About The Speaker

Manik Varma is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India and an Adjunct Professor of computer science at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. His research interests lie in the areas of machine learning, computer vision and information retrieval applied to web search and advertising. Classifiers that he has developed have been deployed on millions of devices around the world and have protected them from viruses and malware. His algorithms are also generating millions of dollars on the Bing search engine (up to sign ambiguity). In 2013, he and John Langford coined the term extreme classification and found that they had inadvertently started a new area in machine learning. Today, by happenstance, extreme classification is thriving in both academia and industry with Manik’s classifiers being used in various Microsoft products as well as in the wider tech sector. Manik recently proclaimed “2 KB (RAM) ought to be enough for everybody” prompting the international media to cover his research and compare him to Bill Gates (unfair, Manik’s more handsome!). Manik has been elected a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, been awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, the Microsoft Gold Star & Achievement awards, won the PASCAL VOC Object Detection Challenge, the WSDM best paper award and stood first in chicken chess tournaments and Pepsi drinking competitions. He has served as an Area Chair for premiere machine learning, artificial intelligence and computer vision conferences and is serving as an Associate Editor of the IEEE PAMI journal. Manik is also a failed physicist (BSc St. Stephen's College, David Raja Ram Prize), theoretician (BA Oxford, Rhodes Scholar), engineer (DPhil Oxford, University Scholar), mathematician (MSRI Berkeley, Post-doctoral Fellow) and astronomer (Visiting Miller Professor, UC Berkeley).