Welcome. I am Philips George John,
a PhD student at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore (NUS), supervised by Prof. Arnab Bhattacharyya (now at the University of Warwick). I am now being supervised by Prof. Divesh Aggarwal and Prof. Xiaokui Xiao.
From February 2023 - July 2025, I was supported by the Descartes Project at CNRS-CREATE, Singapore. Prof. Silviu Maniu (at the Université Grenoble Alpes) is the PI and also provides greatly-valued mentorship and supervision.
I have been fortunate to visit the Université Paris-Saclay (hosted by Prof. Silviu Maniu, June 2023) and the Institut de Recherche en Informatique Fondamentale (IRIF) Paris (October 2024, hosted by Prof. Frederic Magniez). I have also made long visits to the LIG Lab at Université Grenoble Alpes (July-September 2024, hosted by Prof. Silviu Maniu), and to the Simons Institute (Causality Program, April-May 2022).
Prior to my doctoral studies, I was a Blue Scholar at the IBM India Research Lab (IRL) in Bengaluru (erstwhile Bangalore); where I spent two years working on research problems related to Fairness and Explainability in Machine Learning. Before working at IBM-IRL, I was a Masters (M.Tech. CSE) student at the Dept. of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore; where I worked on algorithms and pseudorandomness with Prof. Arnab Bhattacharyya.
Vita
Before embarking on graduate studies, I had a brief but fruitful stint in industry as a Software Engineer at Oracle India (Trivandrum). Prior to that, I obtained my undergraduate degree (B.Tech. Computer Science and Engineering) in 2014, at the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology in Kottayam, Kerala (affiliated to Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala at the time).
As might be easily inferred from the above paragraph, I am a Keralite (and/or a Malayali), born and brought up in Kottayam — the land of Letters, Lakes and Latex — in the lovely state of Kerala, India. I also have roots in the neighbouring district of Pathanamthitta. Till date, I have lived (for more-than-negligible periods) in Kottayam, Thiruvananthapuram, Bengaluru, and Singapore.
Publications
My DBLP page My Google Scholar page Note: αβ indicates that the author list is in alphabetical order of surnames, as is the convention in Theoretical Computer Science and Mathematics.- Product Distribution Learning with Imperfect Advice. NeurIPS 2025 (Spotlight) Preprint (arXiv)
- Distribution Learning Meets Graph Structure Sampling. NeurIPS 2025 (Poster) Preprint (arXiv)
- p-Mean Regret for Stochastic Bandits. AAAI 2025 (Poster) Preprint (arXiv)
- Learning multivariate Gaussians with imperfect advice. ICML 2025 (Poster) Preprint (arXiv)
- Efficient, Low-Regret, Online Reinforcement Learning for Linear MDPs. Preprint (arXiv)
- Reliable Counterfactual Explanations for Autoencoder based Anomalies. COMAD/CODS 2021
- Verifying Individual Fairness in Machine Learning Models. UAI 2020 Preprint (arXiv)
- Soft computing model for optimized siRNA design by identifying off target possibilities using artificial neural network model. Gene (May 2015)