Dr. Rajeev Rastogi
B. Tech., 1988, Computer Science and Engineering

Dr. Rajeev Rastogi the Vice President of Machine Learning at Amazon India. He obtained his B. Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Bombay in 1988 and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas, Austin, USA in 1993.

At Amazon India, Dr. Rastogi leads the development of Machine Learning solutions for Amazon’s India business in the areas of Search, Advertising, Deals, Catalog Quality, Payments, Forecasting, Question Answering, etc. Previously, he was the Vice President of Yahoo! Labs in Bangalore where he was responsible for research programs impacting Yahoo!’s web search and online advertising products. Dr. Rastogi has done pioneering work on mining massive amounts of data for interesting knowledge and patterns. The CURE and ROCK algorithms he proposed were among the first highly-scalable clustering techniques in the literature. CURE relies on a clever combination of sampling and data partitioning to detect arbitrarily-shaped clusters in large datasets, while ROCK exploits information on common neighbors to produce high-quality clusters for categorical attributes. In addition, Rajeev has written a series of influential papers on efficiently computing distance-based outliers, inferring a DTD schema for XML documents (XTRACT), mining frequent sequential patterns (SPIRIT), constructing decision tree classifiers (PUBLIC), and retrieving similar images (WALRUS) – these works have been instrumental in shaping the data mining field and continue to inspire follow-up research even today. At Bell Labs, Dr. Rastogi built DataBlitz, one of the early commercial main memory database systems, with support for ACID transactions, storage management, indices, data replication across geographically distributed sites, and data versioning protocols that enable non-blocking reads. DataBlitz’s innovative memory mapping architecture enables applications to perform lookups an order of magnitude faster than disk-based database engines – consequently, it forms the core platform for many of Lucent’s switching products requiring real-time response times. Dr. Rastogi has published over 125 papers in top-tier international conferences. According to Google Scholar, his research publications have over 26,500 citations and an h-index value of 72. Rajeev has also been a prolific inventor with 100 issued US patents. He is currently a member of the News editorial board of the CACM, and was a Program Co-chair for the SIGKDD conference in 2016, CIKM conference in 2013 and the ICDM conference in 2005.

Dr. Rastogi was named an ACM Fellow in 2012 for his contributions to large-scale data analysis and management. He was named a Bell Labs Fellow in 2003 for his contributions to Lucent’s networking products while he was at Bell Labs Research in Murray Hill, New Jersey (1993-2004). He launched and led two premier research labs in India: Bell Labs (2004-2008) and Yahoo! Labs (2008-2012). Dr. Rastogi has many awards and honours to his credit which includes ICDM Research Contributions Award 2016; ACM Fellow 2012 for contributions to large-scale data analysis and management and Bell Labs Fellow 2003 for contributions to Lucent’s networking products.

Special Memories

Never before had I been exposed to such a large concentration of talent, not only in academics, but also in other spheres – in my hostel, there was a grade 8 pianist, a national level swimmer, a talented singer, guitarist, debater – the list goes on. It was truly a humbling experience. The people I met and friends I made at IIT inspired me to continually improve myself, grow and excel in multiple dimensions – I learnt swimming and made it to the IIT swim team. Looking back, I feel that IIT gave me the freedom and opportunity for all round development. The four years here prepared me well for the real world.