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Professor Balaraman Ravindran is a Professor and Head of the Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He serves as the Founding Head of the Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI, the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and AI, and the Centre for Responsible AI at IIT Madras. He is also the Mindtree Faculty Fellow at the institute. Ravindran joined IIT Madras in 2004 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2009, and became Professor in 2018. He has held visiting positions at the University of Technology Sydney, the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, and Google Research Bengaluru.
Ravindran earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2004, with a thesis titled “An Algebraic Approach to Abstraction in Reinforcement Learning.” He received an M.Sc. (Engineering) in Computer Science and Automation from the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore in 1996 and a B.E. in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, in 1993. His research focuses on reinforcement learning, responsible AI, deep reinforcement learning, geometric deep learning, network analytics, and deep learning, with more than three decades of experience in the field. He is an elected Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (2025) and the Indian National Academy of Engineering (2023), an ACM Distinguished Member (2021), and a recipient of the Artificial Intelligence Exploration Award (2026). In 2026, he was appointed to the United Nations Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence. Ravindran chaired the committee that drafted the India AI Governance Guidelines and has served on numerous national and international committees, including those of the Reserve Bank of India, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, and the World Economic Forum. He maintains an h-index of 52 according to Google Scholar.
Indian researchers at IIT Madras and IBM unveil IndiCASA and DECASTE tools exposing caste bias in ChatGPT and other AI models, implications for higher ed hiring.
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