Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
-- Mahatma Gandhi

Associate Professor Department of Computer Science and Engineering Room 402, School of IT Building Indian Institute of Technology Delhi Hauz Khas, New Delhi, 110016, India Affiliate Faculty Department of Computer Science and Engineering Paul Allen Center, Box 352350 University of Washington Seattle, Washington, 98195, U.S.A. Email : mausam AT cse DOT iitd DOT ac DOT in, mausam AT cs DOT washington DOT edu Phone : +91-11-2659-6076 (O), +1-206-979-7038 (C)
I am looking for technically strong and ambitious PhD students interested in applications of artificial intelligence (machine learning, natural language processing, crowdsourcing, automated planning). Please contact me if you are one of them. I am also interested in industry related problems that can be solved using AI techniques. Contact me if you think you have an interesting problem.
I am not looking for winter/summer interns or students for short-term (less than a year) projects. Please do not contact me with such requests. I am unable to respond to them personally.
Newsworthy In Jun'17 I was a Program co-chair for the 27th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling in Pittsburgh. In Jul'16 I was invited to deliver a talk in the Early Career Spotlight Track at IJCAI'16 in New York. In Jul'16 our STARAI'16 paper titled Contextual Symmetries in Probabilistic Graphical Models received the best paper award. In Jun'16 I was elected as a councilor to AAAI Executive Council. Send me email if you have specific agenda items for AAAI Council meetings. In Apr'16 I was awarded a Young Faculty Research Fellowship under the Visvesvaraya PhD scheme for Electronics & IT by Govt. of India. In Apr'16 I was interviewed by ML India. The transcript of the interview. In Aug'15 we released the first version of the Data Analytics & Intelligence Research (DAIR) group website. In Jan'15 at AAAI'15, I was awarded the AAAI Senior status, a distinction in the field of artificial intelligence. In Jan'15 I was awarded a Teaching Excellence Award for my Spring 2014's AI course. In Sep'14 I appeared on NDTV Profit to defend Artificial Intelligence at a debate show titled, The Contrarian. At HCOMP'13 our paper titled Crowdsourcing Multi-Label Classification for Taxonomy Creation received the best paper award. In Oct'13 I joined as a faculty member at IIT Delhi after a six year research faculty stint at University of Washington, Seattle. In July'12 Andrey Kolobov and I released a monograph titled Planning with Markov Decision Processes: An AI Perspective. In July'12 I co-organized the UW-MSR Summer Institute on Crowdsourcing Personalized Online Education.
Research My main research interests are in the field of Artificial Intelligence. At present I am working on the following projects: Open Information Extraction: We hope to overcome the "knowledge-acquisition bottleneck" by automatically extracting information from natural language text in a domain-independent manner. We work on improving the quality of Open IE extractors by pushing their precision and recall. Our recentmost Open IE extractor is publically available. We are currently extending it to process noun phrases and numeric extractions better. A recent paper on this work. AI Applications to Crowd-sourcing: Crowd-sourcing has taken over the business world by storm in the last few years. Although it is touted as "Artificial Artificial Intelligence", there are huge opportunities for AI to contribute to its success. A vision paper describes our approach to this synergy. We have investigated decision-theoretic techniques to automatically control workflows on a crowd-sourcing platform such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, and have obtained significant quality improvements for the same price. Recent papers on this work: Paper 1, Paper 2, and Paper 3. Abstractions in Machine Learning: We hope to exploit symmetries and other implicit domain abstractions to scale up a variety of machine learning and inference algorithms. We work on reducing computation in Markov Decision Process (MDP) algorithms such as UCT by aggregating symmetric states and state-action pairs. We also work on exploiting similar properties in the context of probabilistic inference. A recent paper on this work. Applications of Open IE: Open Information Extraction is a domain-independent knowledge representation language that is different from linguistic suggestions such as semantic role labeling or domain-specific ontologies. We work on exploring the various applications that Open IE enables. We recently released OREO, a rapidly retargetable software to map open extractions to a domain ontology. In this recent paper we show that Open IE representation beats dependency parsing, and semantic role labelers in learning useful word vector representations via deep learning. Earlier, in this paper we used Open IE to automatically induce domain-independent event schemas.
Hobbies In my personal time, I can be found listening to, playing, or singing hindustani classical music. I performed with a Seattle light Indian music band called Pratidhwani (our last show was Kashish in December 2012). I was also involved with Seattle's local cricket tournament where I tried my fingers at off-spinning. Movies and cooking take up whatever remaining free time I have. Here is a website I host that contains interesting links about hindustani classical music.