Kaushik Chakrabarti

About

Kaushik Chakrabarti is a senior researcher in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 AI Research (opens in new tab) group. Before that, he was a senior researcher in the Data Management, Mining and Exploration group at Microsoft Research. His research interests include database management, natural language processing, information retrieval and artificial intelligence. He has published  50+ research papers in the above areas and holds 50+ patents. Two of his papers have won best paper awards (ACM SIGMOD 2001 and VLDB 2000). His work has shipped in several Microsoft products including Bing, Cortana, Office 365 and Dynamics 365. He regularly serves on the program committees of top-tier conferences like ACM SIGMOD, ICDE, WWW, ICDM and ICME as well as reviewer of reputed journals like ACM TODS, VLDB Journal and TKDE. In the past, he has served as an associate editor of TKDE,  member of the editorial board of Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal, PC vice-chair of ICDE 2012 conference and program co-chair of DBRank 2011 (at VLDB 2011). Kaushik received his Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

Research Interests

Kaushik’s interests spans areas in computer science including data management, natural language processing, information retrieval and artificial intelligence. He is currently focused on developing ways to search, analyze and explore data using natural interfaces like natural language, conversations and voice. He is working in Microsoft’s Dynamics team to build products in this area.

Recent News

(8/2018) Our text-to-SQL parser IncSQL takes the top spot on WikiSQL leaderboard (opens in new tab)! This is collaboration with interns Tianze Shi and Kedar Tatwawadi and several scientists from MSR Redmond and Microsoft Dynamics 365 AI Research team! Here is the link (opens in new tab) to the paper. Here (opens in new tab) is the official blog post from Microsoft!

(6/2016) Algorithmically generated table answers ships in Bing! This is based on our research on web tables. Bing now shows a table as an answer to a query with list or superlative intent. Try a search like drugs for high cholesterol (opens in new tab), largest cities in the world (opens in new tab), longest life expectancy countries, (opens in new tab) top computer science schools (opens in new tab), richest county in usa (opens in new tab), renaissance painters from italy (opens in new tab) or mlb stadiums (opens in new tab) on Bing and see table answers! We are working on a V2 to dramatically increase the coverage!

(8/2015) Synonym technology ships in Bing’s entity-linking technology which in turn powers several applications like Bing Snapp (opens in new tab), Ask Cortana (opens in new tab), and Bing Knowledge Widget (opens in new tab)!

(4/2015) Algorithmically generated table captions ships in Bing! This is based on our research on web tables we have been doing over the last few years. Try a search like highest mountains in usa (opens in new tab), list of futurama characters (opens in new tab), airports in florida (opens in new tab) or breaking bad episodes (opens in new tab) on Bing and see table captions! Table caption is shown as part of the snippet of the top (sometimes second or third) algo result and typically complements the information shown in the vertical answer (e.g., carousel) shown on top.

(12/2013) I have been invited to serve as area chair for the Applications and Experiences (DB Track) area in CIKM 2014 (opens in new tab).

(10/2013) Synonyms technology ships in Dynamics AX for Retail (opens in new tab) to enhance e-commerce search

(7/2013) Synonym API (opens in new tab) becomes part of Bing Dev Center (opens in new tab)

(7/2013) Microsoft announced (opens in new tab)that PowerQuery will be part of Office 365

(3/2013) Our work on web table search shipped in Excel Power Query (opens in new tab). This work was done in close collaboration with SQL Server and Excel groups. Please try the add-in out and give us feedback.

(10/2012) Our synonym work was released externally via the Synonym API (opens in new tab). Please try it out and give us feedback!

(7/2012) I have been invited to give a keynote talk at the Workshop on Entity-oriented and Semantic Search (JIWES) (opens in new tab) at SIGIR 2012 (opens in new tab). Here is the title and abstract.

(12/2011) I have been invited to serve as the area chair for the “Query Processing and Optimization” track in ICDE 2012

(8/2011) I have been invited to serve as a workshop co-chair for VLDB 2014 to be held at the beautiful Hangzhou, China (opens in new tab).

(7/2011) The Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal (opens in new tab) (Springer’s international journal on database management and information retrieval) is planning a special issue on ranking in databases. I am the editor of this special issue. If you are working on ranking in databases, please consider submitting your work to this special issue. The deadline for the paper submission is October 7, 2011. The call for papers can be found on the journal web site: http://www.springer.com/journal/10619 (opens in new tab)

(4/2011) The fifth international workshop on ranking in databases (DBRank) 2011 (opens in new tab) will be held in conjunction with VLDB 2011 in Seattle, WA, USA. Davide Martinenghi and I are the program co-chairs. If you are working on ranking, please consider submitting a paper to DBRank 2011 (opens in new tab). The deadline is June 7, 2011.