IIIT Hyderabad alum Pradeep Varakantham, a professor of computer science at Singapore Management University is undertaking impactful research to reignite native intelligence in a technology-driven world. As Director of CARE.AI lab and Kuan Yew Fellow, his work focuses on enhancing human ability through AI systems (specifically Reinforcement Learning), to improve quality of life metrics.
The famed traffic jams of Bengaluru make the perfect noisy statement of the downside of rapid urbanization. Deterioration in quality of life metrics is reflected in a woeful waste of productive man-hours stuck in traffic, cabs canceling on you, abysmal response time in emergencies, coupled with uneconomical and uncoordinated usage of common resources (ambulances, taxis, security personnel) became Pradeep’s muse.
During his sixteen-year tenure at SMU’s School of Computing and Information Systems, Prof. Pradeep Varakantham has worked closely with various governmental agencies of Singapore and won a slew of awards and recognition. His team received the Strategic Partner Award from the Singapore Civil Defense Force for building dynamic Resource Optimization systems, and strategic positioning of emergency resources (ambulances, fire trucks). Their systems also had concrete applications in the nation’s Transportation, Entertainment, and Security systems.
They received the Ministry of Education Tier 2 Grant, awarded to possibly 10% of applicants, for their proposal on Optimizing Dynamics in Safety and Security Networks. One of the domains dealt with randomized patrolling of Singapore’s territorial waters by police and coast guard and the strategic positioning of boats for emergency response.
Legacy-makers – Founding batch of IIITH
A true-blue Hyderabadi, Varakantham completed his schooling from Defense Lab School RCI and Sri Chaitanya. It was his father, a scientist in DRDO who first triggered his interest in Math and who brought a reluctant Pradeep to the counselling session at IIIT Hyderabad. But it was the powerful presentation skills of Prof. Kaul, Prof. Rajeev Sangal and Ajay Sawhney that convinced the youngster to give it his best. The faculty’s IIT background, their plans to design a new curriculum focused on computer science and the promise of a strong research component made a big impact on him.
“It was an amazing four years”, he recalls. “I was working with professors like Rajeev Sangal and Kamalakar Karlapalem on internships and research projects. We published a paper at a special ACM Special Interest Group in early fourth year and at an international conference. I have wonderful memories of Prof. Govindarajulu’s classes that was a lot of fun, till you became the focus of his attention!” smiles the alum. “Since the canteen was still finding its legs, a lot of friendships evolved because we were going out so much. Helping the Lab administrators to set up the computer systems, the Age of Conquerors multiplayer overnight matches along with cricket were some great memories from those days”.
“I think the differentiating factor at IIITH is the strong research culture even at the undergraduate level. Being the only batch on campus was a bit odd, but we became a tight knit group”, reminisces Varakantham who regularly drops in on campus to catch up with batch mate Prof. Praveen Paruchuri. “We have had a few successful student collaborations between IIITH and SMU that have resulted in noteworthy publications”, he adds.
Ph.D and a fulfilling career graph
Post-IIITH, Varakantham worked for a year and soon realised that he wasn’t enjoying it because the “coding wasn’t exciting”. That pretty much became the pivot for Varakantham to move to research. He joined the University of Southern California for his Ph.D under Prof. Milind Tambe. “Sequential decision-making has been the common theme from my Ph.D days. But what has changed is the discovery of new applications and new usage areas. I worked with Prof. Steve Smith from the Robotics Institute on sequential decision-making, during my post-doctoral tenure at Carnegie Mellon”. Two years later in 2009, Varakantham took the bold decision to join SMU, Singapore for what would be a fiscally-sound decision and strategic career move.
During his sabbatical he was invited as Visiting Scholar to Harvard University’s Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS), Harvard John Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).
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There is a chain of thought, primarily in the academic arena that believes that excessive use of AI tools negatively impacts native intelligence. “We have conducted human subject studies which shows that, with extended dependence on AI tools, people stop using their brain as much as before and brain performance drops”.
Human ability improvement and nudging people’s behaviour
Trustworthy Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods is Varakantham’s current focus area. “We are currently working with SkillsFuture Singapore or SSG, to develop nudging mechanisms for improving course delivery ”, he adds.
Another critical research area is on improving people’s cognitive flexibility to combat the variety of innovative scams in the public arena, that is becoming stealthier and tougher to tackle. How does one identify a scam? “Here you are trying to improve human ability to recognize scams, with applications that can nudge people’s behavior through AI systems. This initiative on human ability improvement is a SD$ 6 million grant that we received from AI Singapore in 2021”, observes Varakantham who has continued to work on sequential decision-making problems from his thesis days.
Hello Taxi and some newsy government collaborations
“My specialisation is in developing sequential decision-making methods for large-scale environments with complex settings in emergency response, security, transportation etc; each with a different flavour”, explains the professor. For the Land Transport Authority, IIITH Ph.D scholar Meghna Lowalekar and Sanket Shah developed neural approximate dynamic programming approaches for Effective Real-Time Ridesharing. “We also created a GPS-enabled system that guides taxi drivers and reduced their idle time by 28%. For the emergency response department, the School of Information Systems worked on Fire truck and ambulance positioning, based on demand on different days of the week and different times of the day. We worked with security agencies including the Ministry of Defense to help allocate security resources, with the assumption that adversaries were monitoring these allocations”.
Awards, a Maharashtra forest and interesting projects
“Many of our awards have been for urban decision problems”, points out the researcher who has over 150 publications featured in the top 10 % conferences and is recipient of an award from Informs IAA for analytics-related work and Best Demo award at AAMAS 2018.
“Two of our papers on minimizing regret in uncertain MDPs and sequential matching in bike sharing systems were published in Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and received a lot of citations”, notes Varakantham who was a panelist on the Channel News Asia show on Responsible AI. Receiving recognition at IJCAI 2016, a premier conference for early career research was one of the high points of his career along with his appointment as General Chair for ICAPS 2020 and Outreach Chair for AAAI 2026 covering Singapore, India and China.
In 2021, Varakantham worked with Google AI for social good as a visiting researcher. He was a principal investigator (PI) on a $6 million SGD project on trustworthy AI for training non-expert humans in safety critical environments, to train non-expert humans (2021-2025). He was also a co-PI on a large $10 million SGD grant to develop navigational glasses for accomplishing complex tasks. A chunk of that grant was focused on multi-agent decision-making processes for error recognition and correction, explains Varakantham who is on the AI Singapore Scientific Committee and received his AAAI senior membership in recognition of his long-term contributions to the community.
Among his social impact initiatives, one interesting project investigated a forest in Maharashtra with human-animal cohabitation, that reported attacks leading to loss of human life and property. The team analyzed patterns of incursion and presented prevention interventions. For a collaborative project led by Prof. Milind Tambe at Google Research and in conjunction with Armaan (NGO), “we built an AI system to monitor and improve the NGO’s engagement with pregnant mothers, for the identification of drop-outs and methods to ensure that the engagement continued. This is currently a national effort involving lakhs of beneficiaries.
Among his impactful research were two papers with Ph.D researchers Supriyo Ghosh and Meghna Lowalekar, on dynamic repositioning to reduce lost demand in bike-sharing systems and on utilizing sequential matching to improve performance of taxi fleets; that featured in the Journal of AI Research (JAIR) and AI Journal (AIJ), respectively.
That which drives the researcher
Nowadays, non-fiction and books on Neuroscience, top Varakantham’s reading list. In his spare time, he enjoys kicking back and watching movies and sports on the telly or listening to old film music. He loves running and plays league cricket in Singapore. “I enjoy travelling with family on vacations around Singapore or to meet family in the US, Hyderabad and Warangal”, observes Varakantham who recently returned from a 2-week family holiday in Japan.
“Can we use AI systems to measure and monitor the mental acuity of humans and improve it over time, across different theatres of activity? We have received good results on medium-scale human subject studies with our AI training systems that improve their cognitive and discerning abilities. In the next couple of years, we hope to see something, both from a commercial as well as from a research standpoint”, prophesizes Prof. Pradeep Varakantham.
Deepa Shailendra is a freelance writer for interior design publications; an irreverent blogger, consultant editor and author of two coffee table books. A social entrepreneur who believes that we are the harbingers of the transformation and can bring the change to better our world.