Akshat KUMAR

Akshat Kumar is an Associate Professor (Research Track) in the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University (SMU). He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2013) and was previously a Research Scientist at IBM Research India.

Research Focus: His work lies at the intersection of AI, Machine Learning, and Multiagent Systems, with applications in urban mobility optimization (e.g., autonomous vehicles, maritime traffic management), decision-making under uncertainty, and computational sustainability. He leads the Representation, Learning, and Reasoning (RLR) Lab, which develops algorithms for large-scale multiagent coordination using reinforcement learning and probabilistic inference.

Awards & Grants: Recipient of the Lee Kong Chian Fellowship (2020-22), Best Paper Awards at AAAI (2017) and ICAPS (2014), and featured in IEEE’s 'AI’s Ten to Watch' (2018). Principal Investigator (PI) of Singapore MOE Tier-2 grants totaling S$1.1M for projects like 'Data Driven Collective Decision Making For Urban System Optimization' (2019–2021).

Education & Teaching: Taught courses on computational thinking, artificial intelligence, and spreadsheet modeling. Advises PhD students and research engineers on topics like reinforcement learning, maritime traffic simulation, and cloud security policy design.

Impact: His research addresses challenges in urban systems, such as optimizing autonomous taxi fleets, reducing maritime congestion, and improving smart grid management. Collaborations include Fujitsu-SMU Urban Computing Lab and Singapore port authorities.