Manik Varma
Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research India
Adjunct Professor of Computer Science, IIT Delhi
<manik@microsoft.com>
I am a researcher at Microsoft Research India and an adjunct professor of computer science at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. My research interests lie in the areas of machine learning, computational advertising and computer vision. Classifiers that I have developed have been deployed on millions of devices around the world and have protected them from viruses and malware. My algorithms are also generating millions of dollars on the Bing search engine (up to sign ambiguity). In 2013, John Langford and I coined the term extreme classification and found that we had inadvertently started a new area in machine learning. Today, by happenstance, extreme classification is thriving in both academia and industry with my classifiers being used in various Microsoft products as well as in the wider tech sector. I recently proclaimed 2 KB (RAM) ought to be enough for everybody
prompting the media in the US, India, China, France, Belgium and Singapore to cover my research and compare me to Bill Gates (unfair, I'm more handsome!). I have been awarded the Microsoft Gold Star award, the Microsoft Achievement award, won the PASCAL VOC Object Detection Challenge and stood first in chicken chess tournaments and Pepsi drinking competitions. I have served as an area chair/senior PC member for machine learning, artificial intelligence and computer vision conferences such as AAAI, CVPR, ICCV, ICML, IJCAI and NIPS and am serving as an associate editor of the IEEE PAMI journal. I am also a failed physicist (BSc St. Stephen's College, David Raja Ram Prize), theoretician (BA Oxford, Rhodes Scholar), engineer (DPhil Oxford, University Scholar) and mathematician (MSRI Berkeley, Post-doctoral Fellow).
Research
I am interested in the following research areas
- Machine learning: Machine learning for the Internet of Things, extreme classification, recommender systems, multi-label learning, supervised learning.
- Computer vision: Image search, object recognition, text recognition, texture classification.
- Computational advertising: Bid phrase suggestion, query recommendation, contextual matching.
Joining my group: I am looking for full time PhD students at IIT Delhi and Research Fellows at Microsoft Research India to work with me on research problems in supervised machine learning, extreme classification, recommender systems and resource constrained machine learning for the Internet of Things. Please e-mail your CV to me directly in addition to formally applying to IIT/Microsoft's programmes. IIT offers PhD Fellowships in collaboration with Microsoft and many other labs such as Facebook, Google, IBM and TCS. Please look at the CSE and SIT Departments' web pages for more details and other funding opportunities.
Projects: Unfortunately, I am unable to supervise projects of students outside IIT Delhi. If you are an external student and would like to work with me then the best way would be to join IIT Delhi's PhD programmes or apply for a Research Fellowship at MSR India.
Internships: If you are a PhD student looking to do an internship with me then please e-mail me directly. I have only one or two internship slots and competition is stiff so please apply early. Please do not apply to me or e-mail me about internships if you are not a PhD student as I will not be able to respond to you.
Professional Activities
- Programme Co-chair: ICVGIP 2014
- Area Chair/Senior PC Member: AAAI 2018, IJCAI 2016 - AI on the Web, ICML 2016, ICML 2015, CVPR 2014, ACCV 2014, ICCV 2013, ICVGIP 2012, NIPS 2011, ICVGIP 2010
- Workshop Co-chair:
Dagstuhl Extreme Classification Seminars,
Extreme Classification 2017,
TinyML 2017,
Extreme Classification 2016,
Extreme Classification 2015,
RecTech 2015,
The MSRI Machine Learning Summer School,
Extreme Classification 2013,
WebVision 2012,
The Mysore Park Computer Vision Workshop,
The MSRI Computer Vision & Graphics Shindig,
The Winter School on Machine Learning and Computer Vision
- Keynotes and Selected Invited Talks:
ACM India 2018 Summit,
CODS+COMAD 2018, NASSCOM's Annual Tech Conference 2017,
DSI@KDD 2016,
DICTA 2015,
Big Targets@ECML/PKDD 2015,
X@ICML 2015, Budgeted ML@ICML 2015, LSOLDM 2014, ISI Kolkata ML Unit Founder's Day Lecture 2014, BDA 2013, IIIT Delhi Institute Lecture 2013, ICVGIP 2012, MPMLW 2012
- Committees: ACM India SIGKDD Steering Committee, Shiv Nadar University BDAC Advisory Board, DST-EPSRC 2012 Expert Panel on Applied Mathematics
- Teaching: 2009/CSL864
2013/CSV884
2016/SIV895
2018/COV878
Code
Datasets
Current PhD Students
Publications
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Y. Prabhu, A. Kag, S. Harsola, R. Agrawal and M. Varma.
Parabel: Partitioned label trees for extreme classification with application to dynamic search advertising.
In Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference, Lyon, France, April 2018.
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Y. Prabhu, A. Kag, S. Gopinath, K. Dahia, S. Harsola, R. Agrawal and M. Varma.
Extreme multi-label learning with label features for warm-start tagging, ranking and recommendation.
In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, Los Angeles, California, February 2018.
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A. Kumar, S. Goyal and M. Varma.
Resource-efficient machine learning in 2 KB RAM for the Internet of Things.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning, Sydney, Australia, August 2017.
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C. Gupta, A. Suggala, A. Gupta, H. Simhadri, B. Paranjape, A. Kumar, S. Goyal, R. Udupa, M. Varma and P. Jain.
ProtoNN: Compressed and accurate kNN for resource-scarce devices.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning, Sydney, Australia, August 2017.
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H. Jain, Y. Prabhu and M. Varma.
Extreme multi-label loss functions for recommendation, tagging, ranking & other missing label applications.
In Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, San Francisco, California, August 2016.
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Extreme Classification Repository |
Talk
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K. Bhatia, H. Jain, P. Kar, M. Varma and P. Jain.
Sparse local embeddings for extreme multi-label classification.
In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Montreal, Canada, December 2015.
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Extreme Classification Repository
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Y. Prabhu and M. Varma.
FastXML: A fast, accurate and stable tree-classifier for extreme multi-label learning.
In Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, New York, New York, August 2014.
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Extreme Classification Repository |
Slides |
Talk on Extreme Classification & FastXML
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D. Vasisht, A. Damianou, M. Varma and A. Kapoor.
Active learning for sparse Bayesian multi-label classification.
In Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, New York, New York, August 2014.
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P. Jawanpuria, M. Varma and J. Saketha Nath.
On p-norm path following in multiple kernel learning for non-linear feature selection.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning, Beijing, China, June 2014.
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C. Jose, P. Goyal, P. Aggrwal and M. Varma.
Local deep kernel learning for efficient non-linear SVM prediction.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning, Atlanta, Georgia, June 2013.
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Slides
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R. Agrawal, A. Gupta, Y. Prabhu and M. Varma.
Multi-label learning with millions of labels: Recommending advertiser bid phrases for web pages.
In Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, May 2013.
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Slides
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A. Jain, S. V. N. Vishwanathan and M. Varma.
SPG-GMKL: Generalized multiple kernel learning with a million kernels.
In Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Beijing, China, August 2012.
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B. Hariharan, S. V. N. Vishwanathan and M. Varma.
Efficient max-margin multi-label classification with applications to zero-shot learning.
Machine Learning Journal, , 88(1):127--155, 2012.
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V. Jain and M. Varma.
Learning to re-rank: Query-dependent image re-ranking using click data.
In Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference, Hyderabad, India, March 2011.
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Slides
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S. V. N. Vishwanathan, Z. Sun, N. Theera-Ampornpunt and M. Varma.
Multiple kernel learning and the SMO algorithm.
In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems,
Vancouver, B. C., Canada, December 2010.
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Spotlight
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B. Hariharan, L. Zelnik-Manor, S. V. N. Vishwanathan and M. Varma.
Large scale max-margin multi-label classification with
priors.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine
Learning, Haifa, Israel, June 2010.
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Code
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M. Varma and A. Zisserman.
A statistical approach to material classification using image
patch exemplars.
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
, 31(11):2032--2047, November 2009.
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Abstract |
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A. Vedaldi, V. Gulshan, M. Varma and A. Zisserman.
Multiple kernels for object detection.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer
Vision, Kyoto, Japan, September 2009.
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M. Varma and B. R. Babu.
More generality in efficient multiple kernel learning.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine
Learning, Montreal, Canada, pages 1065--1072, June 2009.
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T. E. de Campos, B. R. Babu and M. Varma.
Character recognition in natural images.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer
Vision Theory and Applications, Lisbon, Portugal, February 2009.
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Abstract |
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Download English and Kannada datasets
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M. Varma and D. Ray.
Learning the discriminative power-invariance trade-off.
In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on
Computer Vision, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October 2007.
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Errata
Please see the errata regarding the Caltech experiments
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M. Varma and R. Garg.
Locally invariant fractal features for statistical texture
classification.
In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on
Computer Vision, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October 2007.
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N. Adabala and M. Varma and K. Toyama.
Computer aided generation of stylized maps.
Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, 18(2):133--140, May 2007.
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M. Varma and A. Zisserman.
A statistical approach to texture classification from single images.
International Journal of Computer Vision: Special Issue on
Texture Analysis and Synthesis, 62(1--2):61--81, April 2005.
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M. Varma and A. Zisserman.
Unifying statistical texture classification frameworks.
Image and Vision Computing, 22(14):1175--1183, December 2004.
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M. Varma.
Statistical Approaches To Texture Classification.
DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford, October 2004.
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Download in pdf format (~18 Mb)
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M. Varma and A. Zisserman.
Estimating illumination direction from textublue images.
In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and
Pattern Recognition, Washington, DC, volume 1, pages
179--186, June 2004.
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M. Varma and A. Zisserman.
Texture classification: Are filter banks necessary?
In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and
Pattern Recognition, Madison, Wisconsin, volume 2, pages
691--698, June 2003.
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M. Varma and A. Zisserman.
Statistical approaches to material classification.
In Proceedings of the Indian Conference on Computer Vision,
Graphics and Image Processing, Ahmedabad, India, pages
167--172, December 2002.
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Abstract |
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M. Varma and A. Zisserman.
Classifying materials from images: to cluster or not to cluster?
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Texture
Analysis and Synthesis, Copenhagen, Denmark, pages
139--144, June 2002.
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M. Varma and A. Zisserman.
Classifying images of materials: Achieving viewpoint and illumination
independence.
In Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Computer
Vision, Copenhagen, Denmark, volume 3, pages 255--271.
Springer-Verlag, May 2002.
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M. Varma and V. S. Varma.
Computer simulation of evolution.
In Proceedings of the GIREP-ICPE International Conference,
Ljubljana, Slovenia, pages 138--150, August 1996.
Bibtex source