Manik Varma (computer scientist)

{{BLP unsourced section|date= January 2025}}

He completed his undergraduate degree in Physics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. He was a Rhodes Scholar and earned his PhD from the University of Oxford under the guidance of Andrew Zisserman working on Texture Classification in Computer Vision. He also held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley before joining Microsoft Research.

He conducts research in the fields of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Information Retrieval. In 2013, he started and popularized a new area in machine learning called Extreme Classification (also known as Extreme Multi-label Classification).{{Cite web|title=The Extreme Classification Repository|url=http://manikvarma.org/downloads/XC/XMLRepository.html|access-date=2020-07-26|website=manikvarma.org}}{{Cite journal|last1=Bengio|first1=Samy|last2=Dembczynski|first2=Krzysztof|last3=Joachims|first3=Thorsten|last4=Kloft|first4=Marius|last5=Varma|first5=Manik|date=2019|editor-last=Bengio|editor-first=Samy|editor2-last=Dembczynski|editor2-first=Krzysztof|editor3-last=Joachims|editor3-first=Thorsten|editor4-last=Kloft|editor4-first=Marius|editor5-last=Varma|editor5-first=Manik|title=Extreme Classification (Dagstuhl Seminar 18291)|url=http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2019/10173|journal=Dagstuhl Reports|volume=8|issue=7|pages=62–80|doi=10.4230/DagRep.8.7.62|doi-access=free |issn=2192-5283}} Extreme Classification focuses on Multi-Label Classification at the scale of millions of labels and helps rethink traditional problems of ranking and recommendation.{{Cite web|last=Varma|first=Manik|title=Extreme Classification|url=https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/11/240371-extreme-classification/fulltext|access-date=2020-07-26|website=cacm.acm.org|language=en}} Extreme Classification is thriving in both academia and industry with product integrations in Bing and Amazon. Manik Varma along with his colleagues at MSR India also proposed another paradigm in machine learning called Edge Machine Learning{{Citation|title=microsoft/EdgeML|date=2020-07-25|url=https://github.com/microsoft/EdgeML|publisher=Microsoft|access-date=2020-07-26}} to enable machine learning predictions on tiny IoT devices with as little as 2 KB of RAM assisting in low-energy, low-latency and privacy preserving applications of AI. In the past, he worked on statistical approaches to texture classification, object detection, multiple kernel learning and ranking.

He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology for his contributions to Engineering Sciences in 2019.{{Cite web|title=Awardee Details: Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize|url=http://ssbprize.gov.in/Content/Detail.aspx?AID=554|access-date=2020-07-26|website=ssbprize.gov.in}}{{cite news |last1=Bureau |first1=Our |title=Microsoft researcher Manik Varma among Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar award winners this year |url=https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/science/microsoft-researcher-manik-varma-among-shanti-swaroop-bhatnagar-award-winners-this-year/article29531679.ece |work=@businessline |publisher=The Hindu |date=27 September 2019 |language=en}} His research works won the WSDM Best Paper award{{Cite web|title=Home {{!}} 12th ACM International WSDM Conference|url=http://www.wsdm-conference.org/2019/|access-date=2020-07-26|website=www.wsdm-conference.org}} and BuildSys Best Paper Runner-Up award{{Cite web|title=BuildSys 2019|url=http://buildsys.acm.org/2019/|access-date=2020-07-26|website=buildsys.acm.org}} in 2019. The following year, he became a laureate of the Asian Scientist 100 by the Asian Scientist.{{cite web |url=https://www.asianscientist.com/as100/ |title=The Asian Scientist 100 |author= |date= |website= |publisher= Asian Scientist |access-date= 13 March 2025 |quote= |language= }} He has been elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Indian National Science Academy and the Indian National Academy of Engineering.{{Cite web|title=Nomination Information|url=https://www.inae.in/fellowship-youth-activities/fellowship/nomination-information/|access-date=2020-07-26|website=Indian National Academy of Engineering|language=en-US}} He has also held a Visiting Miller Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley.{{Cite web|title=2018 - 2019 Lunch Lectures|url=https://miller.berkeley.edu/events/lunch-lectures/2015-06-18-21-31-50/2018-2019-lunch-lectures|access-date=2020-07-26|website=miller.berkeley.edu}} He is associate editor-in-chief for the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.{{Cite web|title=TPAMI Editorial Board {{!}} IEEE Computer Society|url=https://www.computer.org/tpami-editorial-board/|access-date=2020-07-26|language=en-US}}

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Category:Living people

Category:Indian computer scientists

Category:Alumni of the University of Oxford

Category:Academic staff of IIT Delhi

Category:University of California, Berkeley people

Category:Year of birth missing (living people)

Category:2023 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery