P. N. Karthik

P. N. Karthik is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Hyderabad. He holds a Ph.D. and Master of Science in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, advised by Prof. Rajesh Sundaresan, and was previously a Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore (NUS) working with Prof. Vincent Y. F. Tan.

Research Interests: His primary research areas include multi-armed bandits, federated learning, differential privacy, reinforcement learning, information theory, and statistics. He focuses on sequential decision-making under uncertainty, privacy-aware learning systems, and optimization in distributed environments.

Publication Trends: His recent work centers on best arm identification in various bandit settings, including restless, federated, and differentially private frameworks. These studies, published in top venues like IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, AISTATS, ISIT, ICLR, and AAAI, reflect a strong theoretical foundation with practical implications in AI and data science.

• Scientific Awards:
• Faculty Teaching Excellence Award 2025, IIT Hyderabad
• First place, Electronics and Communication Engineering category, 100 seconds competition, INAE Kanpur Chapter

Teaching and Mentoring: He teaches courses such as Stochastic Processes and Programming for AI, receiving consistently high instructor ratings (up to 4.95/5.0). He mentors TAs and emphasizes conceptual clarity, active learning, and student engagement. He has collaborated with industry and government bodies like BMTC and Netradyne on transportation research.

Academic Service: He serves on technical program committees for ISIT and APWDSIT and has organized events like the 2024 JTG/IEEE ITSoc Summer School. His collaborators include prominent researchers such as Vincent Y. F. Tan, Rajesh Sundaresan, Krishna Jagannathan, and Yeow Meng Chee.