Professor, Plaksha University
Area of Expertise:
Artificial Intelligence
Dr. Deepak Khemani has been working in artificial intelligence, with a focus on symbolic reasoning.
He started working in AI during his doctoral studies where he explored the application of memory-based planning in the game of contract bridge. Contract bridge is a game yet unconquered by AI, unlike other games like Chess, Go, Backgammon, and Scrabble where machines rule supreme. His current goals are to combine knowledge representation, heuristic search, and constraints processing to build problem solvers. These methods can be applied to create articulate tutoring systems that can help students with math and physics problems, amongst other things.
Dr. Khemani teaches courses at the heart of AI, and has popular courses on Search Methods, Knowledge Representation, and Constraint Satisfaction on the NPTEL/Swayam platform.
Dr. 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.
Dr. 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.
