Deepak Khemani

Professor, Plaksha University

PhD, IIT Bombay

Area of Expertise:

Artificial Intelligence

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About Deepak Khemani

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.

Research

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.

Publications

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.

Research Interests

Search methods for problem solving
Knowledge representation
Memory-based reasoning
Constraint satisfaction problems
Game playing
Epistemic logic

Past Associations

IIT Madras, November 1988 – July 2023
Visiting Scientist, Technical University Munich, 1995 (DAAD), 1996, 1999, two months each
Visiting Scientist, Tata Research Centre, Pune, 1997 – 1998
Visiting Faculty (Dean Students, Chair SCEE) IIT Mandi, 2011
Visiting Faculty (Dean Faculty, Member Inst. Standing Committee), IIT Mandi, 2016 – 2018
Adjunct Faculty, IIT Dharwad, 2019 – 2020

Education

BTech in Mechanical Engineering, IIT Bombay
MTech in Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Bombay
PhD in Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Bombay