IIIT Hyderabad’s professor Dr. Pawan Kumar, heads the OPTImization and MAchine Learning (OPTIMAL) Research group at CSTAR (Center for Security, Theory & Algorithmic Research) Lab. His key research focus is on numerical algorithms with applications in machine learning. We learn more.

It’s been a charmed journey from Shillong to Hyderabad via IIT and three European universities for the academic, whose love for mathematics was inspired by early 20th century mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, Euler, and Gauss, and their foundational contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory and numerical algorithms. Dr. Pawan’s academic portfolio includes a Masters in Mathematics from IIT Guwahati, Ph.D from Inria France and six years of Postdoctoral research at the European laboratories of KU Leuven, Fraunhofer ITWM, and Berlin Math School.

Discovering Math in Meghalaya
“After my undergraduate degree with a major in Mathematics,  I was really interested in the computing side rather than pure math stuff”, reveals Prof. Pawan who grew up in beautiful Shillong in Meghalaya. His Masters from IIT Guwahati was a nice mix of math and computing. “I delved into computational aspects, learned a lot about algorithms, data structures, graph theory, discrete mathematics and numerical methods”. 

“My reading list always inspired me“, laughs the scholar who was enormously motivated by biographies and articles about great computer scientists and mathematicians. Despite some good industrial job offers after masters, his passion lay in research.  Having established a good foundation in math and computing, he went on to explore options for Ph.D. “I was fascinated by Europe chiefly because the biographies that I read, focused on path-breaking work done by mathematicians and computer scientists from France or Germany”. With offers from three excellent research centers, it was a toss of a coin that brought him to INRIA, Paris “arguably the largest lab in France that specifically focuses on computer science.”

A European sojourn
Landing in the buzzing hive of research at Inria was exhilarating for the young scholar.  “I was in the most happening area in the south of Paris, the epicenter with the highest concentration of mathematicians and scientists in one area; hosting talks and seminars by pre-eminent experts and visiting Nobel laureates. You could see the level at which those guys were playing. Sometimes you need to see these references and benchmark, to evaluate where you are and how far you have to go. As was the norm in Europe, I wrapped up my Ph.D in three years and had two noteworthy publications”.

While noteworthy, Pawan felt that it had gone by too fast and he was not ready for a job just yet. “I wanted a few more years of training and exposure in different laboratories” comments the scholar who went on to complete two major postdoctoral tenures. The first was at KU Leuven in the Flemish Region, Belgium. “I mostly worked on numerical methods, building scalable numerical algorithms on high performance computing and in my two years, we had a joint collaboration with the Intel Exascience Lab and other prominent Belgian universities”.

This was followed by a yearlong independent postdoctoral research funded by the ERCIM Fellowship, a Pan-European award.  “I chose to pursue it at Fraunhofer ITWM (Institute for Applied and Industrial Mathematics) Kaiserslautern, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, where the research slanted more towards industrial problems and HPC. At my third postdoctoral stint at Freie Universität Berlin Germany, I worked mostly on optimization problems”. He adds, “With eight years of experience under my belt in the area of numerical methods; three years of Ph.D and five years as postdoc, I was ready to test the waters as an independent researcher and work on a specific set of problems. I applied at various premier Indian institutes and that is how I landed my first job at IIIT Hyderabad’s Center for Security, Theory & Algorithmic Research in 2017”.

A CStarry role
“Within the CSTAR Lab, my Optimization and machine learning lab comprises a mix of Ph.D, MS by research and dual degree students. Since my specialization is mostly in numerical and optimization methods, the work we do tends to lean more towards applied research areas like machine learning, vision, and RL”, notes the professor.

Among Pawan’s collaborations, his ongoing partnership with Microsoft Hyderabad on building generative models, resulted in three good publications. With Anuj Mahajan in Amazon US (now at Apple, US), they worked on optimization methods for multi-agent reinforcement learning. Their partnership with Prof. Junbin Gao and Dr. Andy Han of the University of Sydney resulted in a nice publication in a prestigious SIAM journal; on a min-max optimization problem, with applications in generative modelling.

The world is like an optimization problem
“For me, optimization is at the heart of almost all the problems that we see around us”, says Pawan who teaches courses in applied optimization and advanced optimization. “Even if we look at machine learning, often at the core, there is an optimization problem to solve. “Whether sequential decision-making for an agent or fitting data in machine learning and pattern recognition, the core task remains the same; aligning our prediction function with the observed data. If we can bring in some nice tools from maths and computing and scale it with algorithmic ideas, it will have a significant impact in machine learning. This is my current inspiration and it revolves around optimization and machine learning”, states the professor.

Revving up the excitement on campus
Living in the verdant IIIT campus has been an invigorating experience for the researcher who enjoys the erudite faculty meetings as much as the light-hearted banter and after-class discussions. “But the most exciting part is interacting with my students”, he insists. “Typically, these are eighteen year olds who are very curious to learn. Helping them to build concepts, those technical moments when someone gets excited about some results and the discussions that follow are cherished moments that are hard to describe” comments Pawan who has five journals and over thirty conference papers. “We won the Best poster award in IJCNN 2023 for the paper on Lightweight Deep Extreme Multilabel Classification”. The researcher was awarded the Microsoft Academic Partnership grant in 2019 and the Qualcomm faculty award in 2022.

“The research that my office neighbour Prof. AK Das does and the manner in which he organizes himself is productive and inspiring”, exclaims Pawan who enjoys their long discussions on research management skills, sometimes over a meal or a coffee. “You may work hard but if you do not organise yourself well, it is pointless. Center head and Dean Prof. Kishore Kothapalli initially guided me a lot on settling down in IIITH. Prof. Kishore Kothapalli and Prof. Indranil Chakrabarty were my first contacts in CSTAR at IIITH and the many lessons learnt included teaching practices, institute policies, student guidance, etc. I enjoyed long discussions on various topics with Prof. Srinathan, and co-taught several courses.  IIIT Hyderabad is a research-driven education where we are excited to see our students get hands-on research exposure, with some publications. For a student who wants to build analytical skills, go deeper into research or get some initial taste of research, IIITH is a pretty good place where undergraduate research is taken very seriously. That is what makes it unique in India.  If you really are interested in research, higher studies, but also R&D placements in industry, then IIITH really prepares you well”.

Family and Hobbies
“Growing up in Shillong was fun. It was very organic growth, surrounded by mountains, greenery and very pure air. It was a simple lifestyle, filled with a nice mix of academics and sports”, remembers Pawan who loves listening to Jazz and even today, aspires to schedule a game of tennis or cricket in his free time. “I come from a nuclear family, where my father was an accountant in the electricity department in Meghalaya. I completed my entire schooling from Kendriya Vidyalaya NEPA (Northeastern Police Academy). Reading Ramanujan’s biography -The Man who knew Infinity, in high school really inspired me on how a simple child from a very modest rural background with a lot of motivation, can do such interesting research in maths.”

“I love to travel”, comments Pawan who has served as session chairs in popular conferences. “During conference tours, we grab the few free hours we get to visit local tourist hotspots, sometimes arranged by conference organizers.  I am lucky to have got extensive exposure to European culture in three European countries; France, Belgium and Germany. I learned basic German and speak decent intermediate level French. Culturally, it has been very enriching to witness the multiplicity of people from around the world”.  Dr. Pawan also makes it a point to take time off occasionally to indulge his fondness for long distance cycling. Top of the order was his cycling trip from Chennai to Pondicherry with colleagues. The researcher says philosophically, “What keeps me motivated is coming to office and getting down to work; be it coding, reading papers or guiding and mentoring students.  This is exactly what I have always wanted to do and where I want to be”.