Ashwin Srinivasan - Curriculum Vitae



Research Staff Member, IBM India Research Lab. Co-founder and Non-Executive Research Director,  PharmaDM .
 

Personal Details

Born:
16 April, 1964 in Madras, India.
Citizenship:
Australian/British.
Address:
IBM India Research Lab,
Block 1, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi 110 016, India.
Telephone:
Direct: +91 11 2686 1100 (x 2248)
Fax Machine: +91 11 2686 1555
EMail:
ashwin dot srinivasan at in dot ibm dot com

Current Research Interests

Educational Background

PhD
Area: Non-monotonic logics and their application. In particular, the use of defeasible logic for the photo-interpretion of remotely sensed data. It also looked at the comparative advantage of this representation over methods like Multivariate Gaussian Analysis and Dempster Shafer Theory.
Dissertation: An Artificial Intelligence Approach to the Analysis of Multiple Information Sources in Remote Sensing.. University of New South Wales, Australia (1991).
Supervised by: Professor J.A. Richards and Professor C.A. Sammut
BE (Hons.)
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
University of New South Wales (1987).

Honours, Fellowships, and Invited Talks

2005:
Invited speaker at the Fifteenth International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming (ILP 2005); Invited Speaker at the Workshop on Data Mining and Business, ECML/PKDD-05.
1999:
Invited speaker at the Industrial Day of the Sixteenth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML'99).
1998:
(1) Nuffield Trust Research Fellow in Medical Mathematics (up to 2001), and Research Fellow, Green College, Oxford (up to 2001); (2) Invited  speaker at the Eighth International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming; (3) Invited speaker at EAIA'98, Portugal; and (4) Invited speaker at the Second Workshop on System Engineering and Applied Mathematics, Kobe Institute, Japan.
1997:
(1) Invited speaker at the Workshop on System Engineering and Applied Mathematics, Kobe Institute, Kobe, Japan; and (2) Visited and delivered 2 invited lectures at LIACC, University of Porto.
1996:
(1) Invited speaker at  the Workshop on The Verbalisation of Tacit Knowledge, Keio University, Tokyo; and (2) Invited speaker at the Workshop on Inductive Logic Programming, Hokkaido University.
1995:
(1) Visited and delivered 2 invited lectures at The Mizoguchi Laboratory, Science University of Tokyo;  and (2) Membership of Congregation, University of Oxford.
1992:
Pacific Diagnostics Prize. Awarded for developing a prioritised-logic system for the automatic interpretation of  chemical pathology data. This was later recommended for use in all hospitals in the state of New South Wales.
1987-1991:
(1) Harold G. Conde Memorial Fellow; (2) Australian Post Graduate Research Award; (3) Australian Government Higher Education Scholarship; (4) University of New South Wales Dean's Scholarship; and (5) Honours Class 1 awarded based on performance over 4 years of undergraduate study.
1983-1986:
Tyree-Westinghouse Scholar for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
1982:
Top 5% of New South Wales in the Higher School Certificate.
1981:
Science Merit Award for Physics, University of Delhi.

Employment: History and Area

2003-date:
Research Staff Member, IBM India Research Laboratory, New Delhi; (2006 onwards) Adjunct Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney. Area:  Research into the development and application of machine learning; establish and develop links with Universities and research organisations.
2001-2003:
University Lecturer in Computation, University of Oxford. Co-founder and Non-Executive Research Director of  PharmaDM .
2001-2002:
Fellow in Computation, St Peter's College Oxford; Lecturer in Computation, Trinity College Oxford.
1992-2000:
Nuffield Trust Fellow in Medical Mathematics(1998-2000); Research Fellow, Green College Oxford (1998-2000); Research Officer (1992-1997), Oxford University Computing Laboratory. Area:  Development of ILP and application of ML and statistics to problems in drug design, medicine, natural language processing,  control engineering, robotics, embryology, and architecture. I have successfully examined cutting-edge knowledge-discovery task for companies like Smith-Kline Beecham, Pfizer UK and Glaxo-Wellcome.  My research evoked a great deal of interest within the companies, and has played a key role in establishing  Oxford as an important centre for applied ML.  My ILP systems P-Progol and its successor Aleph are widely used in over 45 research laboratories around the world, and specialised variants are currently being examined for commercial development. This research benefitted from the guidance of Professor Donald Michie and Professor Stephen Muggleton.
1991-1992:
Research Fellow, The Turing Institute, Glasgow; and Research Associate Department of Statistics and Modelling Science, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Area: Use of Algorithmic Information Theory to guide the reliable and efficient construction of rules in a non-monotonic logic.  As far as I am aware, this remains a rare attempt to address the important practical problem of distinguishing between true  exceptions and ``noisy'' data in non-monotonic reasoning.  This research was directed by Professor Stephen Muggleton.
1990-1991:
Research Fellow,  Department of Biochemistry,  St. Vincent's Hospital, Sydney; and Visiting Fellow,  Department of Computer Science, University of New South Wales. Area: Research and development of a method that  acquired prioritised logic rules for the analysis of chemical pathology data.  Writing the complete program required me to interact with hospital staff from various sections.  The program was recommended by the Government for state-wide use in hospitals.  At last check, it had acquired nearly 2400 rules,  and formed the basis of at least two dissertations: one in Medicine,  and one in Computer Science.  Its success has also motivated the recent formation of a company dedicated to developing pathology software  along the same lines.  This research was directed by Professor Paul Compton, and the work was awarded the Pacific Diagnostics Prize in 1992.
1987-1990:
Tutor at the University of New South Wales. Area: Teaching topics that included logic programming,  procedural programming, digital logic, and electronics.
1983-1986:
Trainee at  Tyree-Westinghouse (1983-1984) and  Computer Support at IBM Australia (1984-1986). Area: These were undergaduate training posts.

Professional Activities

Teaching

2003:
``Logic Programming and Learning.'' This is for post-graduate students at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.
2001-2002:
 Operating Systems  and Introduction to Machine Learning
1994-1998:
Organised and lectured a course entitled ``Logic Programming and Learning.'' This was taught to students enrolled for an MSc in Computation at Oxford University.
1991-1993:
Taught several short courses (with S. Muggleton) on Inductive Logic Programming, both to academia and industry.
1987-1990:
During my tenure as Visiting Fellow at the University of New South Wales, I devised the schedule for and taught a bridging course in procedural programming for Master's students. During the course of my research degree, I was employed as a tutor in topics that included logic programming, procedural programming, algorithms, digital logic, and electronics.

Supervision

I have formally supervised the research of 10 MSc students and 1 doctoral student at Oxford. These have been on a wide range of inter-disciplinary projects.  I have also acted as an informal supervisor of 2 doctoral students: one in Computer Science and the other in Clinical medicine (in the latter case, by providing advice on the use of machine learning methods in Embryology).
 

Grants

2006:
I am a co-applicant to the Indian Department of Biotechnology on a grant in Systems Biology, concerned with the identification and verification of microRNA networks.
1998-2002:
I have been a co-recipient of the following grant awards: (1) a UK grant investigating bioinformatic system identification; (2) a European grant investigating  the development of techniques for data mining and decision-support for industry; and (3) a UK grant for developing an intelligent database for functional genomics

Others

  • I am on the Program Committee for the International Inductive Logic Programming Workshop which has been held annualy since 1991. I regularly referee articles for the International Machine Learning Conference, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, European Conference on Machine Learning, Machine Learning Journal, New Generation Computing Journal, and the Journal of Logic Programming.
  • I am a referee for the Australian Research Council and the European Commision.
  • In May and June of 1999, I organised the Nuffield Trust Lectures with Green College on ``Computation, Medicine and Mind.'' The lectures were delivered by Professor Denis Noble, CBE, FRS, Hon FRCP; Professor Michael Brady, FRS, FEng; Sir Andrew Huxley, OM, FRS, Nobel Laureate; Sir Roger Penrose, FRS; and Professor Donald Michie, FRSE, FBCS. Nearly 600 researchers drawn from a wide range of scientific and medical disciplines attended these immensely thought-provoking talks that explored the use of mathematics and computation in understanding various aspects of the human condition.

Publications

A selection of my publications can be found here.