Maunendra Sankar Desarkar

Dr. Maunendra Sankar Desarkar is an Associate Professor at the Computer Science and Engineering Department of Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India, with affiliations to the AI Department. His research spans Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, and Machine Learning, focusing on robust, responsible, and culturally-aware AI systems.

• Education: B.E. (University of Burdwan), M.Tech (IIT Kanpur), Ph.D. (IIT Kharagpur, 2014)

Current work emphasizes zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, dialogue interpretability, and ethical NLP (non-toxicity, empathy). Recent articles explore large language model evaluation, hallucination detection, and tokenization for Indic languages. Collaborations include Microsoft and JICA-funded projects.

Scientific contributions include:

• Microsoft India Ph.D. Fellowship Award
• Yahoo Key Scientific Challenges Honorable Mention (2012)

Students include Suvodip Dey (Ph.D. in Dialogue Systems), Aishwarya Maheswaran, Debolena Basak, Kaushal Kumar Maurya, and Maharaj Brahma. Advises on projects involving disaster response systems, generative AI, and multilingual NLP.