PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Arun Rajkumar

Arun Rajkumar is a machine-learning researcher at IIT Madras whose work spans private classification, pairwise ranking and sequential decision-making. He studied in Neyveli, trained in engineering at PSG College of Engineering and in computer science and machine learning at IISc, then worked at Cisco and Xerox Research before joining IIT Madras in 2019. His research includes privacy-preserving classification, feature-based rankings, rankings under adversarial votes and bandit learning; he received IIT Madras's Young Faculty Recognition Award in 2022. As of October 2026, he is an assistant professor at IIT Madras's Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2012

    Private multiparty classification

    In 2012, he coauthors a differentially private stochastic-gradient algorithm for classification across data held by several parties.

  2. 2015

    Condorcet winners in cyclic rankings

    In 2015, with Suprovat Ghoshal, Lek-Heng Lim and Shivani Agarwal, he develops ranking algorithms that recover Condorcet winners and tournament solution sets from stochastic pairwise preferences that can contain cycles.

  3. 2017

    Inductive Pairwise Ranking

    In 2017, with U. N. Niranjan, he introduces Inductive Pairwise Ranking, which uses item features and matrix completion to learn rankings from sparsely sampled comparisons.

  4. March 2019–May 2025

    From Neyveli to IIT Madras

    He studies in Neyveli near Chennai, moves to Coimbatore for engineering at PSG College of Engineering, then earns an MS in computer science and a PhD in machine learning at IISc. After his undergraduate degree, he works at Cisco; after his PhD, he works as a research scientist at Xerox Research. He joins IIT Madras as an assistant professor in March 2019, and teaches Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning in January–May 2024 and Introduction to Programming in January–May 2025.

  5. 2021–2022

    Deployable AI and a faculty award

    In 2021, he serves as a project investigator at IIT Madras's Centre for Deployable AI, where he works on fairness, bias, explainability, ethics and privacy. His lab studies theoretical machine learning and sequential decision-making. In June 2021, he chairs the First Conference on Deployable AI, and he receives IIT Madras's Young Faculty Recognition Award in 2022.

  6. 2022

    Byzantine Spectral Ranking

    With Arnhav Datar and John Augustine, he coauthors Byzantine Spectral Ranking, an algorithm that produces a reliable ranking when good voters outnumber Byzantine voters.

  7. March 2026

    Bandit learning with control variates

    In March 2026, he coauthors UCB-LCV, a bandit algorithm that combines estimators from rewards and control variates.

  8. As of October 2026

    Assistant professor at IIT Madras

    As of October 2026, he is an assistant professor at IIT Madras's Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI. His research interests include machine learning, rank aggregation and statistical learning.

Career

  1. Since 2021IIT MadrasProject Investigator
  2. Until 2019Xerox

Education

  1. PSG College of EngineeringUndergraduate degree
  2. Indian Institute of ScienceMS

From the biography.

  1. The United States employs an estimated 48% of people shaping AIIncludes IIT Madras. We estimate where the people shaping AI work today, how universities, companies and research institutes split across countries, and how country shares have changed since the 1960s.
  2. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes IIT Madras. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  3. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes IIT Madras. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  4. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes IIT Madras. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Arun Rajkumar yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. A Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent Algorithm for Multiparty Classification proceedings.mlr.press. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Ranking from Stochastic Pairwise Preferences: Recovering Condorcet Winners and Tournament Solution Sets at the Top proceedings.mlr.press. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Inductive Pairwise Ranking: Going Beyond the n log(n) Barrier arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Meet Dr. Arun Rajkumar | Wadhwani School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence wsai.iitm.ac.in. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Arun Rajkumar sites.google.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Department of Computer Science and Engineering | Indian Institute Of Technology Madras, Chennai cse.iitm.ac.in. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Young Faculty Recognition Award joyofgiving.alumni.iitm.ac.in. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Byzantine Spectral Ranking arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits with Limited Control Variates arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. Arun Rajkumar | Wadhwani School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence wsai.iitm.ac.in. Checked 21 October 2026.