Alum Arijit Biswas named as one of India's Top Innovators under 35

On March 10th,  Alum Arijit Biswas (PhD ‘14) was named by Live Mint in conjunction MIT Technology Review as one of eight of India’s Top Innovators under 35. He has been identified as someone whose innovations will shape the future for decades to come. Biswas is currently working as a research scientist at the Xerox Research Centre India.

Biswas joined the Computer Science Department in 2009 after completing his undergraduate degree in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. His research advisor here was Professor David Jacobs. Of his experience as a graduate student at the University of Maryland, Biswas said, “Those five years were the best years of my life. I learned a lot from my adviser David Jacobs, from other professors in the CS department and from fellow graduate students in my lab and in the department.”

As a part of this honor, on March 18-19, Biswas competed in a pitch competition at EmTech India 2016 in New Delhi. He is now also in the global competition to be named as a Global Innovator under 35 in the MIT Technology Review.  Biswas appreciates his experience with innovation at the University of Maryland: “The training for innovation and research that I received here has heavily paid off after I graduated. I have been able to contribute significantly in research and innovation at Xerox Research Centre India."

Biswas conducts research in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Multimedia Analytics. He is working to significantly change the way that we education students, and make it possible for them to learn in new way by  giving anyone who has access to the Internet the ability to make high quality instructional videos.  He has made these instructional videos more user-friendly, by developing a technique called Multimodal Table of Content (MMToC) which combines the spoken and written content of a lecture with outside sources (think Wikipedia), to create table of contents for any video.  Biswas has also conducted research on the learner’s experience with the videos to make the experience more dynamic and allow for ‘change[s] of course’ to allow students to learn even more.  Biswas informed us that these capabilities are part of Xerox Tutorspace Personalized Learning Platform (http://www.xrci.xerox.com/tutorSpace-at-scale-personalized-learning), an e-learning platform that Xerox Research Center India is building and is being piloted at several colleges and universities in India and the United States. 

His work in Vision, ML, Deep Learning, and Multimedia Analyics has appeared publications in leading peer-reviewed international conferences including ACM Multimedia Conference, ACM Intelligent User Interface, and Education Data Mining Conference.

Biswas also credited the lighter times that he has as a graduate student that allowed for his innovative tendencies to flourish: “I also had great fun in the graduate pubs, coffee hours, departmental picnics, ice-cream socials and whenever I had a chat with someone from the department and outside. I would like to thank everyone from University of Maryland, College Park for this achievement. “

Congratulations, Arijit!

A special thank you to Om D Deshmukh, a Research Scientist at XRCI, and an alumnus of the ECE Department, who wrote to share this news about Biswas’ honor.