Priyanka Kumar

Priyanka Kumar

Assistant Professor, Graduate Program Coordinator
College of Arts and Sciences
Department of Computer Science
Office
ST 2244

Dr. Priyanka Kumar is working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Permian Basin, TX, USA. She has extensive experience in multidisciplinary research and established records in the field of AI and Data Science. During her Postdoc at University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), TX, USA, she worked on the “Office of Naval Research (ONR) project” and on a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. As a part of her research work, she worked on predicting the faults in diesel engine across the driving cycles. She has also worked on ML challenges in Earth science and how AI will address bottlenecks in Geoscience.

She has received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IIT Hyderabad), India. She did “Research Internship” in JAPAN under “SAKURA EXCHANGE PROGRAM IN SCIENCE”, at University of Tokyo and funded by JST under Japan– Asia Youth Exchange Program in Science. She has many distinguished academic records including a university – First Rank (Gold Medal) in M. Tech in Database Systems and a Gold Medal in M.Sc. Electronics. She was awarded as the “Most Promising PhD Researcher” in ICDCN 2013, TIFR, Mumbai, India. She was awarded a “TCS scholarship” from TCS under the “Research Scholar Program” for the 9th Cycle and 6th Cycle, “High Valued PhD Fellowship Award” at IIT Hyderabad, India and IIT Patna, India.

She was awarded as a “Young Woman in Engineering” in Computer Science and Engineering at the 4th Venus International Women Awards - VIWA 2019. She has been awarded the “Certificate of Appreciation – Amrita Innovation & Research Awards (AIRA) 2021” for her publications. She has been granted innovation patents and published many papers in conferences and journals. She has guided several graduate and Undergraduate student’s projects. She has successfully carried out industry projects and academia. She is also an IEEE Senior Member & ACM member and serve as a technical committee member, reviewer, and session chair for several reputed conferences in India. She has a great passion for interdisciplinary research on AI & Data Science in Geoscience, education and sustainability.

Professional Body Memberships

  • IEEE Senior Member
  • ACM Member

Work Experience

  • Postdoctoral Researcher, worked on “Office of Naval Research (ONR)” project with Dr. Sumit Jha, Department of Computer Science, UTSA, from January 2023- August 2023
  • Postdoctoral Researcher, worked on Polar Dataset in Antarctic region and supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) and worked with Dr. Sushil Prasad, Department of Computer Science, UTSA, from September 2023- August 2024
  • Assistant Professor in the Department of Computing, Computer Science and Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, India, July 2016 - January 2023
  • Teaching Assistant at Indian Institute of Technology Patna (IIT Patna), India during January 2011 to June 2013
  • Teaching Assistant at Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IIT Hyderabad), India from July 2013 to December 2015

Research Interests

  • Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Big Data, Data Science, AI in Education, Blockchain technology in Supply chains, Software Transactional Memory Systems, Parallel and Distributed Computing and Sustainability

Education

  • Postdoc, University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), 2023–2024
  • PhD in Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Hyderabad, India, 2016
  • MTech. in Database Systems (Gold Medalist- University First Rank), SRM University, Chennai, India, 2010
  • M.Sc. Electronics (Gold Medalist-University First Rank - 2007), MCA – 2008, B.Sc. Electronics (University First Rank -2005)

UTPB Grant/Awards

  • Awarded FY25 RSCA (Research, Scholarly & Creativity Activity) Internal Grant.
  • Awarded HSI STEM Grant for Undergraduate research.
  • Awarded Undergraduate research support grant for guiding undergraduate student’s research project.

Fellowship & Awards

  • Received "Henry Walker Travel Grant to the SIGCSE Technical Symposium, 2025".
  • Awarded “Certificate of Appreciation – Amrita Innovation & Research Awards (AIRA) 2021”, bestowed upon publishing a research paper in an international journal in 2020 paper title “An Efficient and Novel Buyer and Seller’s Distributed Ledger Based Protocol Using Smart Contracts”, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, India.
  • Awarded “Best Poster Presentation” in UG category for the poster entitled “AI based Segmented Anomaly Detection”, co-authored by Dr. Priyanka Kumar at International Symposium for Social Goods (AISG 2021), 30th June -3rd July 2021, organized by department of Computer science & Engineering of Amrita Viswa Vidyapeetham.
  • Awarded as a ‘Young Woman in Engineering’ (Major Area of Study - Computer Science and Engineering) of the 4th Venus International Women Awards - VIWA 2019 celebrated on March 2, 2019 at Radha Regent, Chennai, India during the 4th Annual Women's Meet (AWM 2019).
  • “Research Internship” in JAPAN under “SAKURA EXCHANGE PROGRAM IN SCIENCE”, conducted between IIT, Hyderabad and University of Tokyo and funded by JST under Japan– Asia Youth Exchange Program in Science.
  • Awarded “TCS scholarship” from TCS under “Research Scholar Program” for the 9th cycle in 2014 at IIT Hyderabad.
  • Awarded as “Most Promising PhD Researcher” in PhD Forum of ICDCN 2013, TIFR, Mumbai, India.
  • Awarded “High Value PhD Fellowship 2013” by Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna in 2013.
  • Awarded “TCS scholarship” from TCS under “Research Scholar Program” for the 6th cycle in 2013 at IIT Patna.

Sponsored Research Projects

  • Grant Sanctioned at AMRITA
    • FDP 2022-2023 on “Recent advancement and Challenges in Computational Intelligence, ML and Blockchain Technology” of 3 Lakhs, AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education), Gov. of India.
    • “Virtual Lab Proposal on Blockchain” of 20 lakhs (INR) for 2023-2024 from Ministry of Education (MOE), India, a Govt. of India Initiative.

  • Completed Research Projects at IIT Patna
    • “On Increasing Concurrency in Transactional Memory Systems”, with Sathya Peri between January 2013 – June 2014, Sponsored by NetApp Bangalore for USD 25,000 (~ Rs. 12.5 Lakhs).

Patent

Recent Publications

Technical Reports

Fall Teaching Courses

  • COSC 4385: Data Science
  • COSC 4386: Big Data Analytics
  • COSC 4415: Database Systems

Spring Teaching Courses

  • COSC 6389 - Special Topics
  • COSC 4395 - Research
  • COSC 4460 - Software Engineering
  • COSC 2420 - C -Programming

Recent Certification/Training

  1. CIRTL@UTSA Associate Certification
  2. Teaching Practicum FALL 2023, UBC
  3. CyberAI Winter School attended at UTSA
  4. 2024 NSF Winter AI School
  5. IRB CITI Training on Engineering and Computing Responsible Conduct of Research Course
  6. CITI Training on Essential for Grant Proposal Development
  7. CITI Training on Social/Behavioral Human research

Conferences Reviewer/PC Members

  • Technical Program Committee member of ICDCIT 24
  • Technical Program Committee member of ICCCNT 24
  • Program Committee Member at ICMLDE 24
  • Workshop Chair at ICMLDE 23
  • Technical Program Committee member of ICCCNT 23
  • Subreviewer of IEEE STP-CPS 2023
  • Reviewer of SoCTA 2022
  • Reviewer of SoCTA 2022
  • Program committee (PC Member) of ICEEE2022 (2022 3rd International
  • Conference on Electrical and Electronics Engineering (ICEEE 2022)
  • Technical Committee member (TPC) in IEEE IAS 5th IEEE GUCON 2022
  • Technical Session Chair at ICCCA 2021
  • Technical Session Chair at SD5 Track of GUCON 2021
  • Program Committee reviewer for Industry Symposium at ICDCIT 2021
  • Program Committee reviewer for Student Software Project Contest at ICDCIT 2021
  • Reviewer of ICEEE 2021
  • Reviewer of GUCON 2021
  • Reviewer of ICCCA 2021
  • Sub-reviewer of SRDS 2013
  • Program Committee reviewer for ICCCA 2020