Professor Ram Kumar Scholarships
The Professor Ram Kumar Memorial Foundation has provided a generous donation of US $5000 to be used for providing support to GAME-ARTS attendees who are students or young teachers or young researchers, who are interested in acquiring or reinforcing their knowledge of Game Theory, Mechanism Design, and Artificial Intelligence. This donation owes to Prof. Rakesh Agrawal, President and Founder of the Data Insights Laboratories as well as the President of the Professor Ram Kumar Memorial Foundation, in memory of his father.
The goal of the grant is to enable those desirous of attending the conference but may have no or only partial institutional support to attend the conference. The awardee is expected to provide a 1-pager on their learnings from the conference that can be made publicly available for knowledge dissemination.
We have awarded 60 students with scholarships for GAME-ARTS. The awardee who will be called “Prof. Ram Kumar Scholar at GAME-ARTS” will be eligible for the following privileges:
- Full registration package.
- Complimentary breakfasts, lunches, and dinners on all the 3 days.
- Free accommodation at the IISc campus or close to the IISc campus for 4 days (which will include July 17-19, 2024).
- Opportunity to be considered as an Ambassador for distinguished invitees at the conference.
- Membership to a Google group of all Prof. Ram Kumar Scholars which will provide a unique opportunity for professional networking.
- A Scholarship certificate and name featuring on the GAME-ARTS website.
About Professor Ram Kumar
Prof. Ram Kumar was born on May 25, 1924, and obtained his B.Sc. from Allahabad University in 1943, followed by M.Sc. from Lucknow University in 1945. He was awarded a Ph.D. in 1956 from Lucknow University on the thesis ‘Hankel Transform and Self-reciprocal Functions’, and a Doctor of Science (D.Sc.) in 1963 on the thesis ‘Integral Transform and its Application to the Solution of Flow Problems.’ His D.Sc. thesis won the Bonerjee Prize for best research production.
Prof. Ram Kumar’s academic career spanned from 1949 to 1987, where he served as a faculty member in the Mathematics departments including at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee (then known as the University of Roorkee), Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad (then known as MNREC), and the University of Udaipur. He was also the Principal of the Meerut College as well as the Shyam Lal College. During his academic career, he published 25 research papers and supervised the work of more than 30 research papers. He authored many textbooks, including on programming in ANSI C and Fortran 77 (one of the first textbooks written by an Indian faculty member).
While working as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics in the D.S.B. College, Nainital, Dr Ram Kumar joined IISc for a short period and worked under Prof. P. L. Bhatnagar on the application of integral transforms. During this period, he published a paper titled ‘Propagation of small disturbances in viscous and electrically conducting liquids in the presence of magnetic field,’ co-authored with Prof. Bhatnagar.
He was a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, Allahabad, and served as the Chair of the Board of Studies for various universities.
Always known to be a creative and wonderful teacher, he promoted applied mathematics and computing during its very early years. He established himself as a scholarly academician in the mathematical sciences, with more than 43 creative articles in Hindi Vishwakosh (Encyclopedia).
More details can be found here: Prof. Ram Kumar Memorial Foundation
About Professor Rakesh Agrawal
President and Founder, Data Insights Laboratories
Prof. Rakesh Agrawal is the President and Founder of the Data Insights Laboratories, San Jose, USA. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, both USA and India, a Fellow of ACM, and a Fellow of IEEE. He has been both an IBM Fellow and a Microsoft Fellow. He has served as a distinguished professor internationally (EPFL-Switzerland, Kyoto University, IISc-Bangalore, IIT-Bombay). He has published 200+ highly influential papers, including the 1st and 2nd highest cited in databases and data mining. They have been cited 142,000+ times with 20+ of them receiving 1000+ citations and the top 2 papers receiving 31000+ and 26000+ citations. His papers have received six test-of-time awards from five conferences: SIGMOD (twice), VLDB, ICDE, EDBT, WSD. These awards recognize papers published ten years back that had the most influence in the field and industry. He has received the Innovation Awards given to the topmost researchers from two ACM-SIGs: SIGKDD and SIGMOD. Scientific American selected him in its inaugural list of 50 top scientists and technologists in 2003. He has been granted 88 patents.
IBM’s Intelligent Miner grew straight out of Rakesh’s data mining research. IBM’s introduction of Intelligent Miner created a new category of software and services. Several database companies (e.g., SQL Server, Oracle, SAP) and data analytics firms (e.g., SAS, SPSS, WEKA) incorporated functionalities inspired by Rakesh’s research. He is fondly referred to as the father of data mining because of this pioneering work. His other research has been incorporated in several other IBM products (e.g., OLAP Server, Websphere, Flowmark) and services (e.g., Data governance, Compliance monitoring). While at Microsoft, he co-led the development of Bing Commerce Search. His research was also incorporated in the Bing Web Search (e.g., ranking features, automatic generation of training data).
Rakesh was a founding director of SIGKDD and has held leadership positions in leading professional organizations (SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, CIKM, WSDM, EDM). He has served as General, Program and Industry Chair in international conferences (e.g., EDM2023, VLDB2018, CIKM2017, COSN2015, WWW2014), Journal Editor (e.g., TKDD, TODS, TOIT, TKDE, TC, TPDS, VLDBJ), and in Advisory Boards (e.g., UW-Madison, ECNU-Shanghai, IIT-Roorkee, SNU-Seoul).
Rakesh has played key roles in projects of tremendous societal benefits (e.g., 2005 study on Improving Education System for the President of India, 2006 NRC study of Voter Registration Databases, 2009 NRC study of S&T strategies of six countries). Rakesh applied his technology for enriching textbooks to the NCERT books used by millions in India and provided the results to NCERT to enable the authors to incorporate the improvements in future editions.