IIT Madras’ undergraduate data science program (onlinedegree.iitm.ac.in), started in Jan 2021, with online course delivery and in-person exams, has more than 15,000 enrolled students today. How can high quality education in data science be delivered to such a large number of students? How is quality measured and maintained? How are the students really doing? The talk will touch upon answers to the above questions and further elaborate on the promise such programs hold for the future.

Andrew Thangaraj is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras. His bachelors was from IIT Madras (1998) and PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA (2003). His research interests are in the areas of information theory and error-control coding, and he has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Communications and the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. From Nov 2011, he has been one of the Coordinators of the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL, nptel.ac.in), a multi-institutional project funded by the Ministry of Education and managed by IIT Madras. At NPTEL, he played a key role in the starting of online courses and certification on a massive scale through the SWAYAM portal (swayam.gov.in). He is currently the Principal Investigator for SWAYAM. At IIT Madras, he led a team of faculty that started the Bachelor of Science Degree in Data Science & Applications (onlinedegree.iitm.ac.in), launched in June 2020, with online course content delivery and in-person exams. He is currently a coordinator for this program.

We present a vision for a futuristic programming environment, where ML models and logical rules co-exist and evolve over time. We substantiate our vision using three case studies: (1) safe code generation using large language models, (2) Heterogeneous data extraction, and (2) regulatory compliance for online advertising. Using these case studies, we hypothesize what such a futuristic programming system can do to balance productivity with safety, security and reliability, present new research results, and point to directions for future work.

Sriram Rajamani is Distinguished Scientist and Managing Director of Microsoft Research India. Sriram is an ACM fellow, INAE fellow, and winner of the Computer Aided Verification Award. His work has impacted both academic and industrial practice in programming languages, systems, security, and formal verification. He is currently working on reimagining programming by combining machine learning with program analysis and synthesis. Sriram did his PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley.