"IIT Varanasi: A Journey Towards Excellence"

Rajeev Sangal, PhD
Director
Indian Institute of Technology-Banaras Hindu University

Info session and networking opportunity for students to interact with academic professionals and building connections. 

Abstract
IIT Varanasi is the newest IIT just about two years old. Earlier a part of 100-year old Banaras Hindu University (BHU), the Institute is reinventing itself as an IIT, by building on its strengths and unique features. By connecting with the extraordinary city of Varanasi, it has several challenging problems to solve, where engineering meets social, human, and spiritual dimensions. Several multi-disciplinary projects have been started to deal with cleaning of river Ganga, planning of the ghats, the habitat around them, transport, language and computing, pollution, machinery, new materials, etc. By connecting with BHU, a multi-disciplinary university, IIT enriches its research in many areas, for example, in pharmaceutics, bio-medical and bio-chemical engineering by connecting with the Medical College, Ayurveda College, Dental College, Biology departments, Environment Sciences, etc.

New engineering curricula have been designed for different programs/departments at IIT Varanasi. The curricular framework provides a large amount of flexibility in choice of courses, and uses the ideas of layered learning and practice-theory-practice to promote research and innovation right at the undergraduate level. There is also emphasis on complete development of a student with courses in the Humanities and Social Sciences and Art. It also includes Human Values course which tries to raise issues of life and living, and engages the students in a dialogue so that they can understand themselves, and their relationships, society, and nature.
If you are thinking of taking up a faculty position, and wish to make a major impact, consider IIT Varanasi as your destination!

Biography
Prof. Rajeev Sangal is the Director of the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi. He holds a B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur, and MS and Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania. He is known for his work on computers and processing of human languages, and in particular on automatic translation among Indian languages.

Before joining his current position he led a newly established research University, namely IIIT Hyderabad, for 11 years as its Director. In the new University, he helped create an innovative academic structure around research centres rather than departments; a radical research-oriented undergraduate curriculum; integrated trans- disciplinary B Tech-MS programmes; research that tries to connect with society and industry; and an environment of experimentation, openness, and caring. He designed and helped make human values course a regular part of the academic curriculum which has played a major role in shaping the atmosphere of the Institute, and drawing attention to larger human and societal concerns. 

His research in Natural Language Processing led to the development of Computational Paninian Grammar (CPG) framework. It has been applied to parsing; semantics and morphological analysis of Indian languages etc. and forms the basis of several machine translation systems among Indian languages as well as English. He led and now mentors the multi-institutional consortium that has developed MT systems for 18 Indian language pairs. He has authored 4 books and many research papers.

He is a fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering and of Computer Society of India. He was given Vasvik award in 2008. As the President of NLP Association, India from 2002 onwards he helped organize the community of NLP researchers and started ICON, a high-quality annual NLP conference. He referees for many major conferences such as IJCNLP, ICON, COLING and ACL, and has been on the editorial board of journals Computational Linguistics, Corpora, ACM Trans. of Asian Language Processing, Machine Translation, NL Engineering, Computer Sc. and Informatics, etc.

He was a member of the National Review Committee for PG programs in Engineering in India from 1996-98. He headed the Department of Computer Sc. & Engg. at IIT Kanpur 1987-90 where he spent 15 years as a faculty member.