By Our Reporter
SHILLONG, Oct 5: Noted computer scientist and academician Pushpak Bhattacharyya breathed his last on Sunday at the age of 63.
Born and brought up in Shillong, Bhattacharyya was a topper in the MBoSE HSLC examination 1978 from Jail Road Boys’ School.
He completed his undergraduate studies from IIT Kharagpur (B. Tech) and Masters from IIT Kanpur (M. Tech). He finished his PhD from IIT Bombay in 1994.
He was a professor at Computer Science and Engineering Department, IIT Bombay and had served as the Director of Indian Institute of Technology Patna from 2015 to 2021.
He is widely regarded as the Godfather of Indian natural language processing (NLP), mentioned by Nandan Nilekani, Co-founder and non-executive chairman of Infosys at the Inaugural event of Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat, IIT Madras.
Bhattacharyya was a past president of Association for Computational Linguistics (2016–17), and Ex-Vijay and Sita Vashee Chair Professor.
He was heading the NLP research group Centre For Indian Language Technology (CFILT) lab at IIT Bombay.
His research areas included Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Psycholinguistics, Eye Tracking, Information Retrieval, and Indian Language WordNets – IndoWordNet.
