Happy 50th work anniversary to my advisor!

I spent last weekend attending my Phd advisor, Professor Agrawala’s 50th work anniversary celebration and? getting immersed in his legacy. Professor Agrawala is a leading figure in computer science through his research in systems, computer networks, machine learning, IoT and Wearables Technologies.? During 50 years of incredible service to the Department of Computer Science at Maryland College Park, Dr. Agrawala has led 52 PhD students, 50 Masters students and? thousands of undergraduate students. “Passionate, focused, challenged, open, willing to listen, generous and believing in the impossible” are some of the words that his fellow faculty members, current and graduated students, industry leaders and his children use when asked to describe him.

?Agrawala is also ranked the 27th Most Nurturing Professors in Computer Science, to which his son Maneesh pointed out that we should revisit the algorithm to make sure the ranking is correct (suggesting Agrawala should be #1 :) ). And who can argue with Maneesh as he is an official MacArthur Genius !?

Dr. Agrawala influenced and impacted my and the life of his students in so many different ways that it will be impossible to put everything in this article, what I wanted to share today was how he led me through my Ph.d program from choosing my Ph.d topic and to helping me finish my thesis.

I spent the first two years at the Department of Computer science pursuing my Masters and doing research in the area of Computer Networks. When I decided to stay back and pursue my Ph.d program, I wanted to pick a topic outside of Networks, in an area that I had not studied before (which in hindsight seems like a very adventurous/not highly recommended idea). Professor Agrawala (being himself) was very supportive of this idea and gave me full freedom to pick my thesis topic, and let me explore.? I spent that summer doing my internship at a startup in Bay Area , attended KDD and came back to Agrawala that to share that I wanted to pursue my Ph.D in Multi-Armed Bandits with the thought that he won’t either accept the topic or won’t be able to help much as it is something he has not done before. But contrary to both beliefs, Prof. Agrawala was more excited than me about the problem and immediately started white boarding and guiding me to define the problem, citing papers from his own Ph.D (which was in Applied Mathematics now also called Machine Learning) and helping me make great progress in the area.

10 years ahead, Multi-Armed bandits (a form of reinforcement learning) is one of the key machine learning techniques that are applied across a myriad of problems throughout the world. Companies like Adobe, Amazon, Google use it regularly and have published several research papers on this topic. I am so humbled to play a tiny part in solving different variants of the multi-armed bandit problem while asking/opening more questions on the way. My thesis establishes Bayesian strategies as one of the key strategies for optimizing bandits and solves bandits for large scale arms, rare events, fluctuations in mean (dynamic bandits) and decentralized bandits.? Details of my work are available here.?

Dr. Agrawala is my guru (in its truest philosophical form) and a second father, a gift that I never imagined I would get when I arrived in this country alone at the age of 24 without any family or financial aid to support me. When I attended this weekend’s events, not to my surprise, this was not the sentiment reflected by me alone, but by most of his students who came from far and near to attend this 50th work anniversary.?

Dr. Agrawala’s legacy does not end here, we are all still looking forward to 50 more years of his service. Also, as a gift to incoming students at Maryland, a scholarship has been established in his name “Ashok Agrawala Students Maryland Promise Scholarship”. This is a need-based scholarship for students in the College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences and the Department of Computer Science (CS) so that his legacy can live for many more years to come. If you have been impacted by Dr. Agrawala’s work and would like to help a student in pursuing their dreams, please consider donating!