Aritra Hazra

Eminent Speaker

Short CV: Dr. Aritra Hazra is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur. Prior to joining IIT Kharagpur, he also served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of CSE at IIT Madras from August 2015 to July 2017. Earlier, he did his Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) from the Department of CSE at Jadavpur University (Kolkata) in 2006. He received his Master of Science (M.S.) degree in 2010 and earned his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree in 2015, both from the Department of CSE at IIT Kharagpur.

Dr. Hazra's research interest lies broadly on the areas of Formal Methods, Design Verification, VLSI CAD, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. He has published many research articles in several leading journals and well-known conferences, including two best student paper awards in VLSI Design Conferences (in 2010 and 2017). He also received several accolades for his PhD work, including ACM (India) Best PhD Dissertation Award 2015 and IESA Technovation – TechnoInventor (Ph.D.) Award 2015.

Besides, Dr. Hazra was a recipient of INAE (Indian National Academy of Engineering) Young Engineer Award in 2017 and is an Young Associate of INAE since then. He was also awarded the Associateship of IASc. (Indian Academy of Science) in 2018, IEI (The Institute of Engineers India) Young Engineer Award in 2019 and Institute Faculty Excellence Award (Assistant Professor) in 2021. He is a member of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and a professional member of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery).

Title of Talk 1: Policy Optimization in Reinforcement Learning

Synopsis: The main goal of reinforcement learning is to come up with an optimal policy through which an agent can seamlessly interact with the uncertain and often semi-observable external world (environment). Applying policy gradient methods to search for the optimal policy has been found increasingly useful and widely applicable in large scale problems across a wide variety of domains. In this talk, we aim to present the state-of-the-art policy gradient methods and show the efficacy of various policy optimization techniques in the traditional reinforcement learning setup.

Title of Talk 2: Learning to become Experts in Playing Games

Synopsis: From early days since the inception of artificial intelligence, significant breakthroughs are being made to master the art of playing various strategic games and outperform humans. In one hand, the functional rules of the game are simple enough to learn by the game-playing agents, but achieving master level performance involves understanding the intricate decision-making abilities against intelligent and unforeseen opponent (sometimes expert humans). In this talk, we aim to present the dominance of artificial intelligence methods and reinforcement learning algorithms in game-playing and show how these intelligent techniques are achieving expert-level performance by challenging (and many-a-times outperforming) the professional human players.

Title of Talk 3: Formal Methods for Power Intent Verification

Synopsis: With increasing functionalities of modern low-power integrated circuits, sophisticated power management strategies are deployed to extend the battery life. These strategies involve shutting down parts of the circuit that are not in use, and operating different parts of the circuit in different voltage-frequency combinations thereby balancing power consumption and performance. The power management strategy is decided up front by the architects of the chip, and must be proven to be faithfully implemented in the digital as well as analog (mixed-signal) design counterparts. In this talk, we aim to present the strategies for architectural power intent verification of mixed-signal domains in integrated circuits at the digital-analog boundary is a part of their power management requirement.

Aritra Hazra

Qualifications: Ph.D. (Dept. of CSE, IIT Kharagpur)

Title: Assistant Professor

Affiliation: Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aritra-hazra-70271a7

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About the speaker