Rate My Professor Mitesh Khapra

Mitesh M. Khapra is an Associate Professor in the Department of Data Science and AI (DSAI) at the Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI, Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He heads the AI4Bharat Research Lab at IIT Madras, which focuses on building datasets, tools, models, and applications for Indian languages. His research focuses on bringing parity in AI technologies for Indian languages with respect to English, with specific areas of interest including pretrained multilingual models for natural language and speech, neural machine translation, efficient models for automatic speech recognition, and evaluation metrics for natural language generation. His research work has been published in several top conferences and journals including TACL, ACL, NeurIPS, TALLIP, EMNLP, EACL, and AAAI. He has also served as Area Chair or Senior PC member in top conferences such as ICLR and AAAI.

Prior to IIT Madras, Khapra was a Researcher at IBM Research India for four and a half years, where he worked on problems in Statistical Machine Translation, Cross Language Learning, Multimodal Learning, Argument Mining, and Deep Learning. He completed his PhD and M.Tech from IIT Bombay in January 2012 and July 2008, respectively; his PhD thesis addressed reusing resources for multilingual computation. He is a recipient of the IBM PhD Fellowship (2011), Microsoft Rising Star Award (2011), Google Faculty Research Award (2018), IITM Young Faculty Recognition Award (2019), Prof. B. Yegnanarayana Award for Excellence in Research and Teaching (2020), Srimathi Marti Annapurna Gurunath Award for Excellence in Teaching (2022), and Nasscom AI Game Changer Award (2021, Academic Category).