Professor Balaraman Ravindran heads the Department of Data Science and AI at IIT Madras. He is also the Founding Head of the Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI (WSAI), Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and AI (RBCDSAI), and Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI) at IIT Madras.

He has more than three decades of experience working in reinforcement learning, and his research interest spans responsible AI and deep RL. Prof. Ravi is an elected fellow of the Association for Advancement of AI (AAAI), Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) and an ACM Distinguished Member. He was the Chair of the Committee that drafted the India AI Governance Guidelines to provide a framework for the development and deployment of safe and trustworthy AI systems. He was a member of RBI’s FREE-AI Framework, which provided guidelines for safe, ethical AI adoption in India’s financial sector.

In 2026, he was appointed to the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, established by the United Nations to provide rigorous, independent scientific assessment of AI’s impact on society. Prof. Ravi is also a member of the Technology and Policy Expert Committee (TPEC), a standing expert advisory body to support the functioning of the recently constituted AI Governance and Economic Group (AIGEG).