PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Maunendra Sankar Desarkar

Also known as Maunendra Desarkar

As of October 2026, Maunendra Sankar Desarkar is an associate professor at IIT Hyderabad and an affiliated faculty member in its AI Department. His research spans natural language processing, machine learning, information retrieval and recommender systems. He won second prize at the Second IDRBT Doctoral Colloquium in 2012 for a project on personalized recommender systems, and served as a co-PI and Big Data Analytics group lead on M2SMART from 2017 to 2022 while coauthoring ZmBART in 2021. He received IIT Hyderabad's faculty Excellence in Teaching Award in 2023, and his adaptive document-classification patent was granted in 2024. His 2025 paper studies hallucinations in large vision-language models, and his 2026 paper examines multilingual tokenization for Indian languages.

Timeline

  1. 2012

    A prize for recommender systems

    In 2012, he wins second prize at the Second IDRBT Doctoral Colloquium for ‘Algorithms for Personalized Recommender Systems.’

  2. 2017–2022

    M2SMART and ZmBART

    From June 2017 to March 2022, he serves as co-PI and group lead for Big Data Analytics on the M2SMART SATREPS project. In 2021, he coauthors ZmBART, an unsupervised cross-lingual transfer framework for language generation, with Kaushal Kumar Maurya, Yoshinobu Kano and Kumari Deepshikha.

  3. 2023

    A teaching excellence award

    In 2023, he receives IIT Hyderabad's faculty Excellence in Teaching Award.

  4. 2024

    A patent for document classification

    In 2024, his 2015 patent application with Hari Manassery Koduvely for adaptive document classification is granted.

  5. 2025

    Aerial Mirage at WACV

    In 2025, he coauthors ‘Aerial Mirage: Unmasking Hallucinations in Large Vision Language Models’ with Debolena Basak, Soham Bhatt and Sahith Kanduri at WACV.

  6. 2026

    Tokenization for Indian languages

    In 2026, he coauthors ‘Multilingual Tokenization through the Lens of Indian Languages: Challenges and Insights,’ an empirical study of tokenization across 17 Indic languages and 11 scripts.

  7. As of October 2026

    Associate professor at IIT Hyderabad

    As of October 2026, he is an associate professor in IIT Hyderabad's Department of Computer Science and Engineering and an affiliated faculty member in the AI Department. He holds a PhD from IIT Kharagpur and researches natural language processing, recommender systems, information retrieval and machine learning.

Career

  1. NowIndian Institute of Technology HyderabadAssociate Professor

Education

  1. Indian Institute of Technology KharagpurPhD

From the biography.

  1. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. 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.
  2. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  3. 84% of people shaping AI with recorded undergraduate and doctoral schools changed institutions for their doctorateIncludes Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. 84% of people shaping AI with recorded undergraduate and doctoral schools changed institutions for their doctorate. Across 2,116 people with both an undergraduate degree and a doctorate recorded, we trace which undergraduate schools feed which doctoral programs, how often students stay at the same school, and how paths differ by birth-country region.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. 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.

Sources and credits

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  1. Second IDRBT Doctoral Colloquium - IDRBT idrbt.ac.in. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Maunendra-Research iith.ac.in. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. ZmBART: An Unsupervised Cross-lingual Transfer Framework for Language Generation - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Awards & Honours | Department of CSE, IIT Hyderabad cse.iith.ac.in. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Publications - IIT Hyderabad nlip-lab.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Multilingual Tokenization through the Lens of Indian Languages: Challenges and Insights - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Faculty – Department of Artificial Intelligence ai.iith.ac.in. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Faculty Listing | IIT Hyderabad iith.ac.in. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Maunendra-Homepage iith.ac.in. Checked 21 October 2026.