Ashoka University Hosts exSPLORe 2025: A Premier Workshop on Statistics, AI, and Optimisation

From the Orientation Dashboard to the Parents Mobile app and the Reno Platform, explore how the innovations introduced by the OSA transformed student and parent experiences.

Safexpress Centre for Data, Learning and Decision Sciences at Ashoka University organised Explorations in Statistics, Probability, Learning and Optimisation Research (exSPLORe) 2025 from January 14-18, 2025, at Ashoka University. Twenty-five leading international researchers, including Rama Cont (Oxford), Peter Glynn (Stanford), Manish Gupta (Google DeepMind), Garud Iyengar (Columbia), Balaji Prabhakar (Stanford), Ankur Puri (McKinsey), Ronnie Sircar (Princeton), Devavrat Shah (MIT), and Vijay Vazirani (UC Irvine), presented their latest and most influential research at the event. Around 160 students, roughly half from Ashoka and the rest from across the country, as well as many post-docs, industry participants, and faculty, participated in the workshop.

The highlights of the event included a tutorial and a research talk on the use of diffusion models for generative AI by Praneeth Netrapalli and Dheeraj Nagaraj, both from Google DeepMind. Peter Glynn discussed how he and his co-authors modelled Stanford University’s heating and cooling system using Markov Decision Processes to arrive at significant savings. Vijay Vazirani spoke about efficiently finding stable matchings that are fair.

As part of exSPLORe, on January 16, the Centre’s launch event was held at the Oberoi Hotel in Delhi. At the event, Manish Gupta spoke about the transformative power of AI and its challenges, especially in the Indian context. Garud Iyengar discussed Columbia University’s efforts in advancing AI/ML research, ethical and responsible AI, and the societal impact of AI. Ankur Puri elaborated on the opportunities AI presents in India and its potential impact on various sectors in the country. Rama Cont spoke about the role of different aspects of AI in finance and risk management.

The workshop was very popular among students and other participants who uniformly gave it the highest rating and requested that it be repeated regularly in the future.