Prof Deepak Khemani is a Professor at Plaksha University. He has been working in Artificial Intelligence, with a focus on symbolic reasoning.
He began working in AI during his doctoral studies, where he explored the application of memory-based planning to the game of contract bridge. Contract bridge is a game yet to be conquered by AI, unlike games such as chess, Go, backgammon, and Scrabble, where machines rule supreme. His current research aims to combine knowledge representation, heuristic search, and constraint processing to build intelligent problem solvers. These methods can be applied to create articulate tutoring systems that help students solve mathematics and physics problems, among other applications.
Prof Khemani teaches core courses in Artificial Intelligence and offers popular courses on Search Methods, Knowledge Representation, and Constraint Satisfaction through the NPTEL/SWAYAM platform.
Prof Khemani's research has been on approaches in which an autonomous agent can represent the world around it, draw upon experience to solve problems, and can imagine the future to search for solutions. He has conducted several projects for government and industry, as well as collaborative projects funded by BMBF Germany and UKIERI.
Prof Khemani's 2013 book A First Course in Artificial Intelligence (available here) has wide ranging coverage of the subject. His second more focused book Search Methods in Artificial Intelligence (available here) was published recently.
He has also had interest in popular science and was a member in the small team that started the children’s science magazine Jantar Mantar in the early nineties, published by Tamil Nadu Science Forum. During that period he also wrote a small book Signs of the Zodiac, explaining astronomy to young children. A scanned copy can be found here.