Manik Varma

Manik Varma is a Distinguished Scientist and Vice President at Microsoft Research India, and an Adjunct Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. He is a Fellow of the Indian Academies of Science (IASc, INSA, NASI), the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He has received prestigious awards such as the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize and Microsoft Gold Star Award.

• Education:
  • BSc in Physics from St. Stephen's College (David Raja Ram Prize)
  • BA in Theoretical Physics from the University of Oxford (Rhodes Scholar)
  • DPhil in Computer Vision and Machine Learning from the University of Oxford (University Scholar)
  • Post-doctoral Fellow at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), Berkeley
  • Visiting Miller Professor at UC Berkeley

His research focuses on Machine Learning (Extreme Classification, Resource-efficient ML, Supervised Learning), Information Retrieval (Computational Advertising, Dense Retrieval, Recommender Systems), and Computer Vision (Image Search, Object Recognition). Recent work includes graph-regularized encoders, label variance reduction, and multimodal classification frameworks.

His publications span extreme classification algorithms like NGAME, SiameseXML, and DECAF, with applications in IoT, web search, and recommendation systems. He leads a research group at Microsoft Research India and advises PhD students at IIT Delhi.

• Scientific Awards:
  • Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize (Government of India)
  • Microsoft Gold Star and Achievement Awards
  • WSDM 2019 Best Paper Prize
  • BuildSys 2019 Best Paper Runner-up
  • Fellow of ACM, IASc, INSA, NASI, INAE

He has supervised numerous PhD students, including Sonu Mehta and Suchith Prabhu, and collaborates with institutions like Microsoft Research India, IIT Delhi, and UC Berkeley. His research has led to scalable solutions for billion-label classification and resource-constrained IoT applications.