About the Logo
The Department Logo
The department logo was designed by Anubhav Kumar. Anubhav is a second-year M.Tech RA student, working under Dr. P.K. Srijith in the Bayesian Reasoning And INtelligence research group. He’s interested in the theoretical side of ML, in particular probabilistic machine learning and Bayesian methods, and their applications in the real world. He believes that it is our duty to give back to the community, and hopes to make a positive splash for humanity with his work.
About the Logo
While at a first glace the logo might look like a very stylized AI, but there’s deeper layers! One of the first things one might notice is that the A has an arrow on it, this is a reference to linear algebra, something very heavily used in Artificial Intelligence. If you look closely, the tilt on makes it easily recognizable as the greek letter ฮฑ, along with the i next to it, this is to represent a scaled indicator function, the primary component of an indicator random variable. This is a reference to probability theory, which is also at the heart of almost everything AI.
However, when you combine all these with the circle outside, this is an abstract view of a constrained optimization problem! Since we just have two dimensions on the logo, this is projection of the higher dimensional constrained optimization happening into 2D. These kinds of optimizations are very important for all sorts of model training and selection, since this is essentially what we do in Machine Learning when we try to find the best possible hypothesis explaining the data while being in a limited (regularized) hypothesis space
