Ankur A. Kulkarni's Homepage

CV (may not be up to date) || Google Scholar || Experience || Awards || Bio || Contact

I am the Kelkar Family Chair Associate Professor at the Systems and Control Engineering group, also affiliated with the Centre for Machine Intelligence and Data Science, IITB Trust Lab, and the Koita Centre for Digital Health at IIT Bombay. I presently serve on the IT-Project Advisory Board of the Securities and Exchange Board of India and as a Research Advisor to Tata Consultancy Services.

I am a systems theorist with an interest in systems with strategic agents and informational complexities. I do fundamental research on game theory, information theory, stochastic control and operations research. My recent work is on problems such as security, stealth, nudging and, information disclosure and elicitation.

On the applied side I have worked with industries to study systems where such issues show up, such as financial markets, power systems and smart cities.

Students interested in working with me: If you have a mathematical bent of mind, I encourage you to get in touch with me. You can work with me through either of the centres I am associated with; you can write to me for more details.

Special note about prospective IDDDP students: Please note the requirements about two courses from the minor curriculum in SysCon in the first 6 semesters and plan accordingly. CMinds also has similar requirements.

Also see my research page to see the publications of my students.

Currently looking for students with an interest in

finance and other socio-technical systems, or
physics (in particular, quantum mechanics)

Industries interested in working with me: Agent-based modeling and simulation is a powerful paradigm of Computational Decision-making that leverages Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Machine Learning and Game Theory to answer a variety of what-if questions about the impact of decisions in settings involving multiple agents by modeling and predicting the strategic behaviour of such agents. If you are interested in these or similar questions, please get in touch with me. I have previously been a consultant for SEBI on regulating High Frequency Trading, HDFC Life Insurance Company on computational approaches for incentive design for sales agents, and am presently advising Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd on anti-money laundering and anomaly detection, and Bank of Baroda on smart cash management. Please contact me for more.

Recent updates

17 Mar 2023. Submitted a paper "An Optimized Trading Strategy for an Energy Storage Systems Aggregator in Ancillary Service Markets" coauthored with Smita Lokhande, Yogesh Bichpuriya and Venkatesh Sarangan (all from TCS) to the Journal of Energy Storage
24 Feb 2023. Submitted a paper "Signalling for Electricity Demand Response: When is Truth Telling Optimal?", coauthored with Rene Aid and Anupama Kowli to Systems and Control Letters [arXiv].
18 Jan 2023. Received the Kelkar Family Chair in Quantitative Finance
15 Dec 2022. Ph.D. student Manish K. Singh gets Best student paper award at ICC 2022 for his paper "Strategic Multiclass Classification with Non-uniform Preferences and its Relation to Incentive Compatibility".
20 Sept 2022. My paper "Strategic Multiclass Classification with Non-uniform Preferences and its Relation to Incentive Compatibility", coauthored with Ph.D. student Manish K. Singh accepted by ICC 2022.
11 Sept 2022. My paper "Information Revelation through Signalling", coauthored with student Reema Deori was accepted by the Systems and Control Letters [arXiv].
25 Aug 2022. Will be speaking at the Ashoka workshop on Computation and Economics on September 10th.
25 Jul 2022. Uploaded a new paper "The Quantum Advantage in Decentralized Control", coauthored with Shashank Deshpande [arXiv].
23 Jul 2022. Submitted a paper "A Scalable Bayesian Persuasion Framework for Epidemic Containment on Heterogeneous Networks", coathored with Shraddha Pathak to the Journal of Mathematical Economics [arXiv].
6 Jul 2022. New NPTEL course on Stochastic control and communication, starting this semester. Here's the course introduction. Here's the full playlist.
1 Jul 2022. Will be giving a tutorial at SPCOM on Strategic Communication on 11 July 2022.
17 Jun 2022. Anuj Vora has successfully defended his thesis. Congratulations Anuj!
3 Jun 2022. Gave a talk at the Institut Henri Poincare on "Information Extraction from a Strategic Sender"
27 May 2022. Visited Prof Rene Aid at the University of Paris
20 May 2022. Former Ph.D. student Sharu Theresa Jose to join University of Birmingham, UK as Assistant Professor.
9 May 2022. Signed a research advisory agreement with Tata Consultancy Services.

Education and Experience

Associate Professor, IIT Bombay, Jun 2018 - present

Assistant Professor, IIT Bombay, Jan 2013 - May 2018.

Visitor Department of Automatic Control, School of Electrical Engineering, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, June 7 - 28, 2014.

Postdoctoral researcher, Coordinated Science Laboratory at UIUC, first with Prof P R Kumar and Prof Todd Coleman and then with Prof Negar Kiyavash, 2010-2012.

Instructor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Fall 2010 and Fall 2011.

Ph.D. Industrial Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010.

Visitor at the School of Technology and Computer Science, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India, Summer 2008.

M.S. General Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008.

B.Tech. Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, 2006.

Awards and Honours

Kelkar Family Chair in Quantitative Finance

Research Advisor, Tata Consultancy Services

Member, IT-Project Advisory Committee of the Securities and Exchange Board of India.

Associate of the Indian Academy of Sciences.

INSPIRE Faculty Award, Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. A competitive award comprising of salary and research grant of Rs 35 lakhs (~USD 70000).

Excellence in Ph.D. Research (awarded to my student Sharu Theresa Jose) 2019.

Excellence in Teaching Award for 2018 at IIT Bombay.

Best paper award at the National Conference on Communications, 2017.

Best paper award at the Indian Control Conference, 2018.

Best paper award (runner-up) at the International Conference on Signal Processing and Communications (SPCOM), 2018.

William A. Chittenden Award for an Outstanding Master of Science Graduate in General Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Listed on the "Incomplete List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by their Students in Spring 2007" at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

NSF Travel Grant for the International Conference on Continuous Optimization, Hamilton, Canada, 2007 and IEEE CSS Student Travel Support Award for the Conference on Decision and Control, Shanghai, China, 2009.

Bio

Ankur A. Kulkarni is an Associate Professor and the Kelkar Family Chair in Quantitative Finance at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB). He is a systems theorist with an interest in decision making in distributed, decentralised and strategic environments, with informational complexities, which he investigates using the lens of game theory, information theory, control theory, machine learning, and mathematical optimization. His current focus is on strategic inference, stealth, privacy, information elicitation and nudging. He has published 30 papers in international journals and more than 30 papers in international conferences. He has been a consultant to the Securities and Exchange Board of India wherein he was solely responsible for suggesting regulatory interventions for high frequency algorithmic trading. He presently serves on the IT-Project Advisory Board of SEBI and is responsible for advising SEBI on utilizing advanced technologies such as AI/ML and data analytics and guiding data-related policies for internal use and public use. He is also an advisor to the Tata Consultancy Services and on the technical advisory committee of Maha-IT, a Govt of Maharashtra enterprise. He was previously a consultant to HDFC Life Insurance Company wherein he tackled the problem of design of incentives for sales agents; to Kotak Mahindra Bank Limited on anti-money laundering and anomaly detection, and to Bank of Baroda on smart cash management. He received his B.Tech. from IITB in 2006, followed by M.S. in 2008 and Ph.D. in 2010, both from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He was an Associate (from 2015--2018) of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore (a honour reserved for only 100 scientists under the age of 35 across all fields), he has been an editor for several conferences, a recipient of the INSPIRE Faculty Award of the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, 2013, and of several Best Paper awards and the Excellence in Teaching Award at IIT Bombay. He has been a visitor to MIT in the USA, University of Cambridge in UK, NUS in Singapore, University of Paris, IISc in Bangalore and KTH in Sweden.

Contact

106 Systems and Control Engineering
IIT Bombay
Powai, Mumbai, 400076.
kulkarni.ankur[at]iitb.ac.in
+91-9167889384 (M)
+91-22-25765384 (O)