News
Papers, awards, grants, talks, events and press, newest first, all in one place. Click a photo to enlarge it.
NewsNew film: VayuChat in two minutes, on checked answers over CPCB air-quality data, weather from our own WRF model, offline phone apps, and VayuChat in the field with CEEW. Watch it in 4K on YouTube, or try VayuChat.
NewsOur first lab film: the lab in 2½ minutes, on our research, people and alumni, drawn from the lab’s own data. Watch it in 4K on YouTube.
PaperTwo research announcements: FlowSat accepted at BMVC 2026, and Efficient Time Series SSL via Signal Descriptors accepted for a Short Presentation at IEEE DSAA 2026. Paper PDFs, research summaries and code links are now available.
PaperPaper accepted (oral) at the MILETS Workshop @ ACM KDD 2026: Feature-Informed Self-Supervised Learning for Time Series Understanding!
AwardNILMBench2026 wins the Best Paper Award — Runner-Up at BuildSys 2026 (ACM Sustainability Week, Banff, Canada)! Led by 2nd-year undergraduates Aayush Kuloor, Anurag Singh, and Harsh Dhru.
For “NILMBench2026: A Benchmark for Energy Disaggregation” at the 13th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (ACM BuildSys 2026), ACM Sustainability Week, Banff, Canada. The work was led entirely by second-year undergraduates.
PaperThermEval accepted at KDD 2026! Benchmarking vision-language models on thermal imagery with Ayush Shrivastava, Kirtan Gangani, Laksh Jain, and Mayank Goel (CMU).
PaperNILMBench2026 accepted at BuildSys 2026! A reproducible benchmark for energy disaggregation, led entirely by 2nd-year undergraduates Aayush Kuloor, Anurag Singh, and Harsh Dhru.
PeopleDr. Zeel B Patel successfully defends his PhD thesis. Second PhD graduate from the lab. Congratulations!
AwardBalbir Prasad, Saaransh Shandilya and Parv Thacker awarded IndiaAI MTech Fellowships!
GrantReceived ANRF ARG (Anusandhan National Research Foundation - Accelerate Research Grant)!
AwardFiled Indian patent application for ApneaEye — non-contact screening and classification of sleep apnea (App. No. 202521107821)!
PaperPaper accepted at AAAI 2026 (AI for Social Impact): fast, differentiable air-quality sensor placement.
In the press: DD NewsThe Live Ahmedabad
PaperPaper accepted at CODS-COMAD 2025
PaperPaper accepted at NeurIPS 2025
PeopleKirtan Gangani and Deena Lad join Sustainability Lab as Research Assistants. Welcome!
AwardProf. Nipun Batra receives Test of Time Award for NILMTK! Recognition for significant long-term impact on energy disaggregation research.
For significant long-term impact and contributions to the energy disaggregation research community
AwardDr. Rishiraj Adhikary receives Commendation for Outstanding Research (PhD) at IIT Gandhinagar Convocation 2025!
IIT Gandhinagar Convocation 2025
AwardProf. Nipun Batra wins the SIGEnergy Rising Star Award 2025!
Citation: “For contributions to reproducible toolkits, scalable models, and uncertainty-aware approaches for practical energy disaggregation.”
EventOrganizing ACM India Summer School 2025 on AI for Social Good at IIT Gandhinagar (June 2-13, 2025)
AwardProf. Nipun Batra receives Excellence in Teaching Award based on outstanding teaching contributions and active learning strategies!
Citation: “Based on his contributions and achievements in teaching, as evidenced by students’ feedback on his teaching, including outstanding organization and conduct of courses as well as the adoption of active learning strategies.”
AwardShataxi Dubey wins Third Prize in Simply Speaking 4.0 Competition organized by Leadership Development Initiative, IITGN!
Organized by Leadership Development Initiative, IITGN
AwardShrimay Shah and Dhruv Gupta win Third Prize in Undergraduate Research Showcase for Brick Kilns Detection project!
Project: “Brick Kilns Detection and Compliance Study” (guided by Prof. Nipun Batra)
PeopleTanu and Meenakshi join Sustainability Lab as Junior Research Fellows. Welcome!
PeopleDr. Rishiraj Adhikary successfully defends his PhD thesis. Congratulations!
MediaVayuBuddy, our LLM-powered air-quality chatbot, in the news.
In the press: Indian ExpressAhmedabad MirrorChitralekhaDivya Bhaskar
AwardProf. Nipun Batra promoted to Associate Professor at IIT Gandhinagar!
AwardDevodita wins the Bhalodia-Khetan Summer Research Excellence Award for ML sustainability project!
Project: “ML for Sustainability: Satellite Data Preprocessing for Detecting Pollution Sources Using Computer Vision” ₹50,000 cash prize and Certificate of Excellence
TalkTalk on “Smart Health Sensing for Sustainable Future” at PDEU
TalkDoctoral Consortium keynote “Within and Beyond: Lessons in Computational Sustainability” at ACM Compass’24
AwardZeel wins the prestigious Microsoft Research India PhD Award!
PeopleAyush and Suraj successfully defend their Masters thesis!
AwardRishiraj selected for the prestigious Heidelberg Laureate Forum!
One of only 200 individuals worldwide selected to meet laureates from various fields, including Turing Award winners
Paper“JoulesEye: Energy Expenditure Estimation and Respiration Sensing from Thermal Imagery” accepted at IMWUT 2024
In the press: Hackster.ioIndian ExpressCMU NewsZME ScienceTechXploreEurekaAlert
PeopleShataxi, Prince and Poornima join the lab. Welcome!
Paper“AirDelhi: Fine-Grained Spatio-Temporal PM Dataset” poster at NeurIPS 2023
Paper“Scalable Identification of Brick Kilns with Active Learning” at NeurIPS 2023 workshop
AwardRishiraj Adhikary is a finalist for the UbiComp Gaetano Borriello Outstanding Student Award.
Paper“Fine-Grained Spatio-Temporal PM Dataset From Delhi” at NeurIPS 2023 Datasets Track
Paper“Conformal Prediction: A Visual Introduction” at VisXAI 23
AwardAnkita Jain receives the Gold Medal for Outstanding Research and the President’s Gold Medal (MTech) at the IITGN Convocation 2023.
PeopleKhush and Rishabh join the lab. Welcome!
PeopleAnkita successfully defends her Masters thesis!
PeopleAyush and Suraj join the lab. Welcome!
EventCo-organised MEDFUSE: Medicine, Engineering and Data Fusion for Health.
Paper“I do not know”: Quantifying Uncertainty in NN for NILM at BuildSys 2022
Paper“Uncertainty Disentanglement with Non-stationary Heteroscedastic GPs” at NeurIPS 2022
Paper“Challenges in Gaussian Processes for NILM” at NeurIPS 2022
Paper“SpiroMask: Measuring Lung Function Using Consumer-Grade Masks” at ACM HEALTH
In the press: Ahmedabad MirrorEdgeImpulse
Paper“Continuous Respiration Rate Detection While Walking” at UbiComp 2022
TalkZeel presented “Accurate and Scalable Non-Stationary GPs” at ASIC, Bangalore
AwardZeel selected as Google Summer of Code contributor at TensorFlow with Dr. Kevin P. Murphy!
At TensorFlow under mentorship of Kevin P. Murphy — For recent award announcements and lab news, visit our News page.
Paper“Samachar: Print News Media on Air Pollution in India” at ACM COMPASS 22
Paper“Vastr-GAN: Versatile Apparel Synthesised from Text” at CODS-COMAD 2022
PeopleAnkita joins the lab. Welcome!
AwardZeel B Patel contributes as a co-author to Kevin P. Murphy’s book Probabilistic Machine Learning: Advanced Topics.
Paper“Accurate and Scalable Non-Stationary GPs” at AAAI 2022
GrantReceived $5000 cloud credit grant from Google Research
AwardRishiraj wins Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowship!
USIEF Fellowship
In the press: Education TimesIndian ExpressAhmedabad MirrorIndia Education DiaryCareers 360
AwardRishiraj wins Prime Minister Research Fellowship!
PaperNeural network approaches to NILMTK-contrib at BuildSys 2021
TalkTeaching Ubiquitous Computing course
TalkPublication chair for CODS-COMAD 2022
PaperAir quality perceptions from social media accepted at ACM CSCW
GrantCISCO grant on edge non-intrusive load monitoring
GrantSERB grant on AI and sensor networks for air quality
GrantGoogle grant on COVID and air quality linkages
PaperBayesian Optimization article published on Distill
TalkFaculty development program on data science (TEQIP)
TalkACM India event with Yann LeCun and Shwetak Patel
TalkFour posters presented at CODS COMAD 2020
TalkML talk at INS Valsura for Indian Navy, Army and Air Force officers
TalkEnergy disaggregation talk at ACM BuildSys 2019, NYC
TalkAir quality talk at Google, Bangalore
TalkComputational Sustainability talk at Nirma University
TalkComputational Sustainability talk at ROCS 2019
PaperPaper accepted at WWW
TalkTeaching Machine Learning course
TalkHaroon presented paper at BuildSys 18
GrantMicrosoft AI for Earth grant ($15000 Azure credits)
TalkResearch methods for CS bootcamp at IITGN
GrantTitan XP GPU grant from NVidia
PeopleJoined CSE at IITGN as Assistant Professor
Adding news, an award or press coverage? One entry in data/news.yml.