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M. Sasikumar
Centre for Development of Advanced Computing
Mumbai, India
 

Dr. M. Sasikumar currently serves as the Executive Director of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Mumbai. After his graduation from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, in 1987, he joined C-DAC and had the opportunity to be part of KBCS, a knowledge-based computer system project. KBCS, funded by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), initiated significant development work in various aspects of artificial intelligence in India. His work was mainly in parallel logic programming, a topic of much interest then. He worked on this topic, with Professor R Kowalki, on a fellowship to Imperial College. He built India’s only indigenous expert system shell, called Vidwan, and supported it for many years. With his interest in expert systems, he taught in the field and eventually coauthored a book on the topic.

In a career spanning over 30 years, Sasikumar has played many different roles at C-DAC Mumbai. He was head of the artificial intelligence group (called KBCS) and later created and led the group on educational technology. As part of the KBCS group, he was involved in a number of projects, including oil tanker scheduling, pipeline pumping scheduling, discrepancy detection for import pricing, neural network modeling for predicting electricity consumption, and so on. Later on, he also worked with English-to-Hindi machine translation systems using rule-based and statistical approaches.

As part of the educational technology group, Sasikumar was chief investigator of the project to build virtual labs for schools. This resulted in 170+ school labs covering multiple subjects. These labs were a game changer during the pandemic, as schools remained practically closed for nearly two years. He is now leading a follow-up project to build 500 more labs for schools. Other significant work includes the design and building of an adaptive instruction framework (Anurup), generative question templates, an automated program grading system (Parikshak), and an assessment and monitoring framework.

Sasikumar is an active supporter of the open-source software movement. With his team, he conducted many training programs to encourage and contribute to free and open-source software (FOSS) adoption. On the academic front, seven PhD students have completed their doctorates under his guidance, on topics such as language learning, cloud security, content access for the learning disabled, assessment technologies, and so on. He serves on the Board of Studies or Advisory Board at a number of academic institutions in Mumbai. He is also an adjunct professor in the educational technology group at IIT Bombay (Mumbai).

Sasikumar has over 100 publications, including two books on expert systems and parallel computing, respectively. He is fairly active on LinkedIn, ResearchGate, and Facebook. He has designed and conducted a number of academic programs for C-DAC and IIT Bombay, and has delivered a number of invited talks at workshops and conferences in computing. He has been a regular reviewer for Computing Reviews for over a decade.


     

 Computational formalism: art history and machine learning
Wasielewski A., MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachucetts, 2023. 200 pp.  Type: Book (0262545640)

The field of art has been attracted to high-end technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) for a long time. There are AI-driven drawing programs, for example. However, on a broader scale, the adoption of technology in the art world has not bee...

 

Coding art: the four steps to creative programming with the processing language
Zhang Y., Funk M., Apress, New York, NY, 2021. 296 pp.  Type: Book (978-1-484262-63-4)

Coding art--the title rightly raises eyebrows. Is it about the programming of art, or is it about the art of programming? The latter has been immortalized by Donald Knuth through his famous The art of computer programming series...

 

Cybersecurity in digital transformations: scope and applications
Moller D., Springer, Switzerland, 2020. 133 pp.  Type: Book (978-3-030605-69-8)

Cybersecurity is a critical grand challenge for the world at large today. The COVID-19 pandemic has hastened digitization across all global spheres, and people are spending more of their time online for a variety of needs, from shopping to healthc...

 

Robot rules: regulating artificial intelligence
Turner J., Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Switzerland, 2019. 400 pp.  Type: Book (978-3-319962-34-4)

The fast pace of growth in artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, like deep learning, has transformed many applications. One of the major beneficiaries is the field of robotics. Advanced robots can be seen as embodiments of AI, and h...

 

Transformative teaching: a collection of stories of engineering faculty’s pedagogical journeys
Kellam N., Boklage A., Coley B., Morgan&Claypool Publishers, San Rafael, CA, 2019. 126 pp.  Type: Book (978-1-681735-45-0)

Teaching in higher education institutions is often a challenge, especially for those new to the profession. Classes/eligibility are typically not prescribed for teachers in this space, apart from subject knowledge. This can result in m...

 
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