IIITH alum, Dr. Santhosh Kodipaka was one among the eleven recipients of the IIITH Outstanding Service Award. The award recognizes his long-term commitment to forging a strong alumni base and his significant contribution in co-founding the IIITH Alumni Foundation (IIITH AF), Seattle Chapter.
As the alumnus of the second batch of IIITH, Santhosh witnessed the transformation of the Institute from its fledgling years. After his B.Tech. (Hons) in CSE, specializing in graphics and computer vision from IIIT Hyderabad’s CVIT, Santhosh completed his Ph.D. from the University of Florida. He has spent an enriching fourteen years at Microsoft Seattle, working in several Bing ML teams. He later relocated to the Bay Area to assume his role as Principal ML Manager for Microsoft’s Bing Ads AI division.
“One reason for my attachment to the Institute is that our professors mimicked top-tier international institutes from day one. Earning a stipend as an assistant in the library, and as a teaching assistant was an amazing experience”, recalls Kodipaka.
“There was a surprising amount of trust placed in us”, he observes. “There were no time limits to computer lab access, and one was surrounded by students who were all outliers in their own ways, all self-motivated. Prof. PJ Narayanan (PJN) and Prof. CV Jawahar would put a lot of professional effort into preparing slides and the manner in which they communicated ideas, some of them are still etched in my mind. The lab and hostel atmosphere, the commitment and rigour of faculty definitely stood apart”.
“We were the first batch to organise Felicity. It was Prof. Marathe who came up with the name” recalls Santhosh, who enjoyed social volunteering and has fond memories of organizing Holi and Ganesh puja celebrations on campus. “During our summer vacations, we preferred to stay back in the campus and work on projects in the lab. Prof. PJN, Prof. Jawahar, and Prof. Sangal that I got to work with would spawn a lot of projects for everybody, based on their skill and interest. The moment we were allowed to bring our own desktops into our dormitory rooms, the admins jumped in and quickly set up a campus wide LAN and a digital library. We were working on assignments from our dorms and pushing them to computers in the lab. It seems seamless now but back then it was not an easy task to set it up from scratch. Thanks to my fellow lab admins and the dedicated IT staff”, says Santhosh.
“In the initial years, you would find our professors working late hours and that would keep students inspired. I was very fortunate that in the first two years, we were exposed to different areas in computer engineering, not just to the core curriculum”, he states. “We had access to electives early on and I discovered from my flair for painting that I was predisposed to liking Computer Graphics and Image Processing courses. Loved coding and of course, Computer Vision was about understanding images using math and code”. It was Prof PJN, who simply stated these in the intro class as methods to transform Text to Image, Image to Image, and Image to Text. That was one of the best intro sessions among all the courses I’ve ever attended.
When Santhosh joined the University of Florida, he had two IIITH seniors as roommates, who did a great job of showing him the ropes. It was only when he began his Ph.D there, did he realize how strong was the academic foundation offered at IIITH. “At undergraduate level, our coursework was comparable to that of masters’ students in the US. In my initial weeks, my advisor was surprised to see me building GUI UX quickly for his lab project, and rendering 3D shapes in OpenGL on Unix, that would normally take several months for prior new students”.
Seattle area had the second biggest US cluster of alumni, with Amazon and Microsoft as the two biggest employers there. “By the time I joined Microsoft, around 100 alumni were already there in Seattle. I was able to connect with several folks, thanks to my teaching assistant roles at IIITH. There were so many alumni there that each batch had their own sports schedules and socials”, he observes.
About the ambitious IIITH Alumni Foundation, Santhosh explains, “Vivek Mandava from the first batch, was also my fellow library assistant at IIITH, who happened to be in Seattle as well. It was with him that I spent most of my time thinking about alumni initiatives. We were not formally organised as an alumni group but whenever faculty visited, we would organize picnics and get togethers. Vivek was swept up with the idea of setting up an Alumni foundation as a nonprofit organization. Our brainstorming started sometime in 2013 about the org’s goals, operating principles, activity pillars, etc. It wasn’t easy to find volunteers who could devote time to these exercises. We soon realized that the two of us were good enough to get the ball rolling. Vivek took care of the registration paperwork and sometime in 2016, the Alumni Foundation (USA) was established. The donations from US alumni were now eligible for 501(c)3 tax deductions and enabled the org to receive matching contributions from most of the top employers at scale seamlessly via reliable platforms like Benevity. As the momentum picked up, a Bay Area chapter was set up soon with Subhash Karri, Vardhman Jain and several others”.
“After I left IIITH, fortunately everything I’ve been doing at work, is a continuation of what I learned there”, says Santhosh Kodipaka. “That clarity was seeded at the Institute and I am so very thankful for it”.
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