Prof. Pradeep Reddy Varakantham
Faculty Advisors
Professor of Computer Science; Coordinator, BSc (CS) Artificial Intelligence Track; LSEI Fellow School of Computing and Information Systems
Pradeep Varakantham is the professor of computer science in School of Computing and Information Systems at SMU. He was a visiting researcher at Google in 2022 and at Harvard in 2023. Before that, he did his post-doctoral fellowship from Carnegie Mellon (2007-2009) and PhD from University of Southern California (2003-2007).
His research is at the intersection of sequential decision making, machine learning and cognitive decision making, with applications in transportation, safety and security, education, and others. He has published extensively at top tier conferences and journals in Artificial Intelligence including but not limited to AAAI, NeurIPS, AIJ, JAIR, ICML, ICLR, IJCAI, AAMAS, ICAPS, NAACL and others.
He is a AAAI senior member, received the Google AI for social impact award, was a Lee Kuan Yew fellow from 2022-2025, is part of the ICAPS board, won best paper awards at multiple top tier venues in AI and OR (AAMAS, ICAPS, INFORMS AAAI, PRICAI,..), has received multiple awards for successful deployment of systems developed by his group within Singapore government and was part of the IFAAMAS (board governing the AAMAS conference) board of directors. He has mentored over 15 PhD students, 5 post-doctoral fellows and more than 30 research engineers so far at SMU (from 2009).