Akshat Kumar

Associate Professor
Lee Kong Chian Fellow
School of Information System
Singapore Management University
Akshat Kumar

Hi, welcome to my page! I am a faculty member (research track) at the School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University. I received my Masters and Ph.D. in computer science from University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2012 advised by Prof. Shlomo Zilberstein. Far back in time, I received my Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati in 2005.

I have worked as a research scientist at IBM Research India in the Business Analytics and Mathematical Sciences Dept. from Oct 2012 till Feb. 2014.

My research interests lie at the intersection of AI and ML with a focus on multiagent decision making and reinforcement learning. I am particularly excited by the application of large scale multiagent planning and learning for optimizing urban systems including land and maritime transportation.

Some example ongoing projects include collective multiagent reinforcement learning to compute driver policies for autonomous taxi fleet optimization, and adaptive maritime traffic management for minimizing congestion and the risk of collision in Singapore straits. More details are on my research page.

My work has received several international awards including the best dissertation award from the School of Computer Science, UMass Amherst, and at the 2014 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS); outstanding application paper award at ICAPS 2014 and the best paper award in the 2017 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence’s computational sustainability track. Recently I have been featured among the 2018 AI’s ten to watch list by the IEEE Intelligent Systems magazine.

News

• [Jul 2020] Promoted to Associate Professor

• [Jul 2020] Awarded the Lee Kong Chian fellowship (2020-22) for research excellence, thanks to SMU and the Lee Foundation!

• [Jun 2019] Invited to give an early career spotlight talk at the upcoming International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2019)

• [Jan 2019] Awarded (as PI) the Singapore Ministry of Education Tier 2 Grant for my proposal on Data Driven Collective Decision Making For Urban System Optimization, Jan 2019 - Jan 2022

• [June 2018] Featured ScienceFaces article by StraitsTime

• [May 2018] I am honored to feature among the 2018 “AI’s ten to Watch” list by IEEE Intelligent Systems

• [May 2018] Invited for a spotlight presentation at the AI Singapore Vision of AI Futures workshop

• [Nov 2017] A news article about my work on multiagent planning for autonomous vehicles

• I will be co-chairing the planning and learning track in the upcoming ICAPS 2018 conference

• We are organizing the AAAI-18 workshop on Planning and Inference

• I am being awarded the Lee Kong Chian fellowship (2017-18) for research excellence at SMU!

• Our paper received the Best Paper Award at AAAI 2017 in the computational sustainability track. Here is a picture

• Awarded (as Co-PI) the Singapore Ministry of Education Tier 2 Grant for our proposal on Moving Beyond Data Insights: Optimizing Dynamics in Safety and Security Networks. Jan 2017 - Dec 2019

• Outstanding Application Paper Award, International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), 2014

• Outstanding Dissertation Award, International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), 2014

• Outstanding Dissertation Award, School of Computer Science, UMass Amherst, 2013

• IFAAMAS Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Runner-up Award at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2013

• UMass graduate school fellowship, 2010-2011

• Ph.D. Candidacy with distinction, 2009-2010