arjun k pujari

Arun Kumar Pujari

HOD of  AI & CSE, Adviser & Professor Emeritus
arun.pujari@mahindrauniversity.edu.in

Prof. Pujari joined as Advisor & Professor Emeritus, Department of CSE, Mahindra University in November 2020. He had an extensive tenure from 1985 to 2019 at the School of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Hyderabad. His distinguished career includes serving as the Vice Chancellor of the Central University of Rajasthan (2015-2020) and Sambalpur University (2008-2011). Before joining the University of Hyderabad, Prof. Pujari served at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, and the AutoCarto Cell, Survey of India. His academic journey includes earning a PhD from IIT Kanpur. Prof. Pujari has played pivotal roles in various advisory capacities, contributing to decision-making committees of organizations such as DST, UGC, AICTE, DOS, and more. Notably, he served as the Chairman of the Executive Committee on Conservation of Indian Heritage and Related Matters at DST.  His involvement extends to serving as a member of the Programme Advisory & Monitoring Committee (PAMC) on the Technology Fusion and Application Research (TFAR) Programme of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India. Prof. Pujari actively participated in the development of TechDome for the Central Vista Project, chaired by the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Government of India. Additionally, he was a core member of the group responsible for the Republic Day Tableau by NM-ICPS. He has served as member of the Governing Bodies of several Government Institutions and Corporates. His contributions at the University of Hyderabad include serving as Dean, Head of Department, and various other responsible positions. With over 100 publications to his name, Prof. Pujari has also supervised more than 20 doctoral students.

Ph.D (IIT/Kanpur) 1980

M.Sc (Sambalpur University) 1974

1981-82

Lecturer, Govt. College, Angul, Odisha.

1982-83

Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

1983-85

Chief Instructor, Automated Cartography Cell, R&D Directorate, Survey of India, Dehradun

1985- 1990

Reader (or, Associate Professor) of Computer Science, School of Mathematics and Computer/Information Sciences, University of Hyderabad,

1990- 2019

Professor of Computer Science, Department of Computer & Information Sciences, University of Hyderabad.

2007-2008

Professor (on leave from UoH), The LNM IIT, Jaipur

2008-2011

Vice Chancellor (on leave from UoH), Sambalpur University, Sambalpur, Orissa

2015-2020

Vice-Chancellor (on leave from UoH), Central University of Rajasthan, Rajasthan

International Visiting Assignments

  • Institute of Industrial Sc, University of Tokyo, Tokyo;
  • International Institute of Software Tech, United Nations University, Macau;
  • University of Paris, Paris-Sud, France;
  • Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia;
  • Memphis University, Memphis, USA

BOOKS

2015

Data Mining Techniques, Universities Press (1st ed. 2001) (2nd ed 2011) (3rd ed 2013) (4th ed 2015). More than 20000 copies sold. It was one of prescribed textbooks in many universities of south India, as a reference book in Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in IITs, NITs and RPI, Troy, USA, University of Buffalo, USA.

2002

Database Management Systems, Indian Society of Technical Education (2002), ISBN 9788188057016 Very popular among industry professionals. Satyam Computers Services Ltd used this as their training material every year.

Research Publications

Professor Pujari works primarily in AI, Data Mining, and Combinatorial Algorithms. Some of the highlights are the following

Shape from Silhouettes– During 80’s, the problem of recovery of 3D shape (and structure) from multiple images was one of primary areas of research in Computer Vision. He proposed a novel method of recovering shapes from silhouettes and provided a very efficient algorithm. One of the novelties was to have cameras with changing direction of views which was later identified as Active Vision. His work was one of first proposals in Active Vision. (published in CVGIP, PRL

Knowledge Compilation and Nonmonotonic Reasoning– He proposed a novel method of knowledge compilation by computing prime implicates of propositional logic (published in Journal of Automated Reasoning)

Temporal Constraint Satisfaction Problem– This is yet another area of his significant contribution. His proposal, INDU-Interval Duration Network, initiated many new research activities in TCSP. His proposal of PIDN was presented in IJCAI (Published mostly in AI Conferences, IJCAI, Australian AI, ICTAI, PRICAI etc.)

Virus and Intrusion Detection– His proposal of ML approach to virus detection and masquerade detections is one of the first work of use of text-mining for IDS and are well cited.

Energy Efficient Target Coverage Problem– He developed several theoretical results on this subject. The problem is still unsolved and hoping to address this problem sometime. (Published in ICDCN, IEEE Sensors)

Recommender System and Matrix Factorization– This is the most recent area of his activities. His group’s novel interpretation of Maximum Margin Matrix Factorization yielded several important results. The group demonstrated this in several areas such as in Recommender System, in Multi-label Classification and in Transfer Learning.

Others- In addition to these areas, he takes interest in Scientific approaches preservation of Miniature Painting, Cyber-Physical Systems and AI for literature.