Dr. Ram Kumar Distinguised Visiting Chair Professorship

Dr. Ram Kumar Distinguished Visiting Chair Professorship was established in 2021, with an endowment from Prof. Rakesh Agrawal, President and Founder of the Data Insights Laboratories as well as the President of the Professor Ram Kumar Memorial Foundation, in memory of his father. The Chair will be awarded to distinguished scholars conducting frontier research in the science and engineering of computing.

Nomination Procedure

• The Professorship will be a Division of Electrical, Electronics, and Computer Sciences (EECS) – level appointment with a specially constituted committee chaired by the Dean, Division of EECS.
• The Nominations in each cycle (once in each academic year) will be received from the Departments within the Division of EECS.
• There will be only one appointment per academic year. The same scholar can be appointed at most twice.
• The duration of the visit to IISc will be 4 to 10 weeks. This could be spread over two trips in an academic year.

Benefits

• World-class collaborative research in a topic of mutual interest leading to high impact.
• Seminars/compact course (open to everyone in IISc and local institutions).
• An Institute-level lecture on a cutting-edge topic.
• Mentoring of one or more IISc faculty members and inspiration to motivated students

About Prof. Ram Kumar 

Prof. Ram Kumar was born on May 25, 1924 and obtained his B.Sc. from Allahabad University in 1943, followed by M.Sc. from Lucknow University in 1945. He was awarded Ph.D. in 1956 from the Lucknow University on the thesis ‘Hankel Transform and Self-reciprocal Functions’, and a Doctor of Science (D.Sc.) in 1963 on the thesis ‘Integral Transform and its Application to the Solution of Flow Problems.’ His D.Sc. thesis won the Bonerjee Prize for best research production.

Prof. Ram Kumar’s academic career spanned from 1949 to 1987, where he served as a faculty member in the Mathematics departments including at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee (then known as the University of Roorkee), Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad (then known as MNREC), and the University of Udaipur. He was also the Principal of the Meerut College as well as the Shyam Lal College. During his academic career, he published 25 research papers and supervised the work in more than 30  research papers. He authored many textbooks, including on programming in ANSI C and Fortran 77 (one of the first textbooks written by an Indian faculty member).

While working as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics in the D.S.B. College, Nainital, Dr Ram Kumar joined IISc for a short period and worked under Prof. P. L. Bhatnagar on the application of integral transforms. During this period, he published a paper titled ‘Propagation of small disturbances in viscous and electrically conducting liquids in the presence of magnetic field,’ co-authored with Prof. Bhatnagar.

He was a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, Allahabad and served as the Chair of the Board of Studies for various universities.

Always known to be a creative and wonderful teacher, he promoted applied mathematics and computing during its very early years. He established himself as a scholarly academician in the mathematical sciences, with more than 43 creative articles in Hindi Vishwakosh (Encyclopedia).

More details  can be found here: http://agrawal-family.org/ramkumar/bio.htm.

About Dr Rakesh Agrawal 

Prof. Rakesh Agrawal is the President and Founder of the Data Insights Laboratories, San Jose, USA. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, both USA and India, a Fellow of ACM, and a Fellow of IEEE. He has been both an IBM Fellow and a Microsoft Fellow.He has served as distinguished professor internationally (EPFL-Switzerland, Kyoto University, IISc-Bangalore, IIT-Bombay).  He has published 200+ highly influential papers, including the 1st and 2nd highest cited in databases and data mining. They have been cited 130,000+ times with 35+ of them receiving 500+ citations and 3 receiving 8000+ citations.  His papers have received six test-of-time awards from five conferences: SIGMOD (twice), VLDB, ICDE, EDBT, WSD. These awards recognize papers published ten years back that had the most influence in the field and industry. He has received the Innovation Awards given to the topmost researchers from two ACM-SIGs: SIGKDD and SIGMOD. Scientific American selected him in its inaugural list of 50 top scientists and technologists in 2003. He has been granted 88 patents.

IBM’s Intelligent Miner grew straight out of Rakesh’s data mining research. IBM’s introduction of Intelligent Miner created a new category of software and services. Several database companies (e.g., SQL Server, Oracle, SAP) and data analytics firms (e.g., SAS, SPSS, WEKA) incorporated functionalities inspired by Rakesh’s research. He is fondly referred to as the father of data mining because of this pioneering work. His other research has been incorporated in several other IBM products (e.g., OLAP Server, Websphere, Flowmark) and services (e.g., Data governance, Compliance monitoring). While at Microsoft, he co-led the development of Bing Commerce Search. His research was also incorporated in the Bing Web Search (e.g., ranking features, automatic generation of training data).

Rakesh was a founding director of SIGKDD and has held leadership positions in leading professional organizations (SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, CIKM, WSDM, EDM). He has served as General, Program and Industry Chair in international conferences (e.g., EDM2023, VLDB2018, CIKM2017, COSN2015, WWW2014), Journal Editor (e.g., TKDD, TODS, TOIT, TKDE, TC, TPDS, VLDBJ), and in Advisory Boards (e.g., UW-Madison, ECNU-Shanghai, IIT-Roorkee, SNU-Seoul).

Rakesh has played key roles in projects of tremendous societal benefits (e.g., 2005 study on Improving Education System for the President of India, 2006 NRC study of Voter Registration Databases, 2009 NRC study of S&T strategies of six countries). Rakesh applied his technology for enriching textbooks to the NCERT books used by millions in India and provided the results to NCERT to enable the authors to incorporate the improvements in future editions.