Rajiv Sangal
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Prof. Rajeev Sangal is the Director of the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, a new-era research university in India.
He holds B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur, and MS and PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Besides heading the university, he also leads the largest academic centre on language technology in India, located at IIIT Hyderabad.
His team is working on machine translation systems from English to Indian languages. His work on machine learning combines statistical methods with linguistics structures for the processing of language. Work is also being undertaken pertaining to knowledge representation, information extraction, search engines, and speech. Earlier, while he was a Professor at IIT Kanpur, his team developed language access systems (a kind of machine translation systems) from five Indian languages to Hindi.
His technical contributions pertain to: parsing of free word-order languages, corpora analysis of Indian languages, trainable statistical language analyzers, semi-automatic generation of font converters for Devanagari script, information preservation in MT, comparison of Paninian framework with others such as Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG), Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), Government and Binding (GB).
He has authored 3 books, and a large number of research papers in NLP and AI.
He is the President of NLP Association of India, and a member of the editorial board of Computational Linguistics, journal of ACL. He has served on the editorial board of Computer Society of India's journal from 1995-2003. He referees for ACL, COLING and AFNLP conferences. He is the Program Chair of ICON-02 and ICON-04.
He has also developed and successfully implemented a radical new curriculum in Computer Science and Engg., and Electronics and Communications that promotes research and project work starting from an early stage in the undergraduate level.
He was a member of the Scientific Council of Indo-French Centre for Promotion of Advanced Research from 1991-1994. He was a member of the National Review Committee for PG programmes in Engg., India from 1996-98. He headed the Dept. of Computer Sc. and Engg. at IIT Kanpur from 1987-90, where he spent 15 years as a faculty member. Earlier, he spent two years as research staff at LCS, MIT, Cambridge, USA.
