Hyderabad based Mahindra Ecole Centrale (MEC) College of Engineering hosted the second International Conference on Machine Learning and Data Science (ICMLDS 2018) on December 21-22. Technically co-sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the event brought together researchers working in the fields of Machine Learning and Big Data under one roof to discuss about the current trends and future scope of data sciences. 

The conference was inaugurated by Dr. Anil Sahasrabuddhe, chairman, AICTE in presence of the director of MEC, Professor Yajula Medury, and the general co-chairs of the conference, Prof. Sartaj Sahni, distinguished professor of computer science, University of Florida, and Prof. Prafulla Kalapatapu from the computer science department at MEC.

Dr. Sahasrabudhe emphasised the need for interdisciplinary education and to continually evolve the AICTE to help students in all parts of the country and different socio-economic get the best education that the country can offer. He also stressed on the use of machine learning to address the problems plaguing our country today and encouraged students to participate in the Smart India Hackathon.

The highlight of the conference were the nine keynote and plenary speakers of international repute, who enthralled the participants with the work done in their research labs. The keynote speakers were Dr. Sanguthevar Rajasekaran, director of Booth Engineering Center for Advanced Technologies (BECAT), University of Connecticut, and Dr. Chandrajit Bajaj, from the Center for Computational Visualization at University of Texas – Austin.

Out of 69 research papers submitted to the conference, 31 papers were chosen to be presented at the conference after a stringent technical review process. The best paper of the conference was awarded to “Pradeep Chowriappa & Girish Rentala” for his work on “A Semi-supervised Feature Engineering Approach for Mixed Data Outlier Detection”. The next edition of the conference will be held on December 16-17, 2019.

Mahindra Ecole Centrale (MEC) College of Engineering is an international technology school that marks the foray of the USD 20.7 billion Mahindra Group into the higher education sector.