Dr. Arkaprava Basu Receives ACM India Early Career Researcher (ECR) 2024 Award

January 15, 2024

The ACM India Council is delighted to announce Dr. Arkaprava Basu of IISc as the recipient of the ACM India ECR Award for 2024. Additionally, an Honorable Mention goes to Dr. Sayan Ranu of IIT Delhi.

The ACM India Early Career Researcher (ECR) Award recognizes individuals in early stages of their careers, who have made fundamental, innovative, and impactful contributions to the computing field while primarily working in India. The ECR award carries a prize of ₹15 lakhs. Financial support for this award is provided by Persistent Foundation.

Basu is being recognized "for creative and impactful contributions towards efficient memory management for GPUs and CPUs through innovations spanning the software and hardware stacks." Arkaprava is a leading systems researcher in India with a track record of consistently publishing impactful research in flagship conferences and exhibiting leadership roles at the top conferences of his field. Arkaprava’s research focuses on the software and the hardware of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), which is the workhorse for most AI tasks in today’s data-driven world. His work takes a holistic view of a system design by cutting across the software and hardware stack from the compiler, runtimes, and operating system to the hardware architecture. Besides top academic publications, he also has deep collaborations with and long term consultancy for tech giants in the field.

Basu is an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. Before joining IISc in 2018, he worked as a full-time member of the research staff at AMD Research in Austin, USA, for four years. Earlier, Arkaprava obtained his PhD in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA in December 2013.

Dr. Sayan Ranu is being recognized for “pioneering contributions to graph machine learning, advancing large-scale combinatorial optimization on network data with transformative applications in pollution monitoring, equitable gig economy solutions, and scientific discovery.” Ranu's research exemplifies how rigorous theory can translate to transformative real-world impact, bridging computer science with critical global and India-specific challenges. His work has consistently been published at leading venues in the domain and has also secured prestigious collaborations and funding across diverse sectors, including Google, Mastercard, Flipkart, Qualcomm, Swiggy, and Dominos. The transformative potential of his research makes him widely recognized as a leader in the field.

Ranu holds the joint positions of Nick McKeown Chair Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and the Yardi School of AI at IIT Delhi. He obtained his PhD from the Department of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in March 2012.

The ECR award recipient is chosen by a jury comprising eminent personalities in the computing community. The jury follows a rigorous process wherein each nomination is individually reviewed by all the committee members, then collated and deliberated upon in multiple evaluation rounds, and finally decided in the presence of a Steering Committee-appointed observer.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Arkaprava Basu as the winner and Dr. Sayan Ranu as honorable mention of the ACM India ECR for 2024.