IIT Delhi professor among 14 scientists selected for Swarnajayanti Fellowship Award

Dr. Mayank Vatsa, Associate Professor and Head of Infosys Center for AI at IIIT-Delhi is among 14 scientists who have been selected for the prestigious Swarnajayanti fellowship award instituted by the Department of Science and Technology, for the year 2017-18. He has received the award in the Engineering Sciences discipline.

The government of India had instituted a scheme "The Swarnajayanti Fellowships" to commemorate India's fiftieth year of Independence. Under this scheme, a selected number of young scientists, with a proven track record, are provided special assistance and support to enable them to pursue basic research in frontier areas of science and technology. The fellowships are scientist specific and not institution specific, very selective and have close academic monitoring.

The award comprises financial support to peruse research for a period of five years, and additionally, the scientists are also provided grants for equipment and other facilities. As part of this fellowship, Dr. Vatsa will extend his research in advances in deep learning and Trusted AI with focus on robustness and fairness.

Dr. Mayank Vatsa received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from West Virginia University, USA, in 2005 and 2008, respectively. He has authored about 250 publications in refereed journals, book chapters, and conferences. He was a recipient of several Best Paper and Best Poster Awards at international conferences. His areas of interest are biometrics, deep learning, machine learning, image processing, and information fusion. He is also the Vice President (Publications) of IEEE Biometrics Council where he started IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science (IEEE T-BIOM).