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 also being advised by Prof. Xiaokui Xiao.
Since February 2023, I have been 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 starting my doctoral studies, I was a Blue Scholar at the IBM India Research Lab (IRL) in Bengaluru (erstwhile Bangalore); where I spent 2 years working on research problems related to Fairness and Explainability in Machine Learning (ML). 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 (now also my advisor at NUS).
Before beginning my graduate studies, I had a brief, but fruitful, stint in industry as a Software Engineer at Oracle India, Trivandrum, developing mobile applications (Oracle Sales Cloud). Prior to that, I obtained my undergraduate degree (B.Tech.) in Computer Science and Engineering studying at Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology in Kottayam, Kerala.
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.- p-Mean Regret for Stochastic Bandits. AAAI 2025 (accepted) Preprint (arXiv)
- Learning multivariate Gaussians with imperfect advice. Preprint (arXiv)
- Efficient, Low-Regret, Online Reinforcement Learning for Linear MDPs. Preprint (arXiv)
- Distribution Learning Meets Graph Structure Sampling. 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)