Jayanthi Sivaswamy

Jayanthi Sivaswamy is an Indian computer scientist and academic, currently the Raj Reddy Chair Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. She served as the Dean of Academics at IIIT Hyderabad from 2015 to 2021. Her research interests include image processing, biological and computer vision, and medical image computing. She is known for her works in fields of medical image analysis, computer-aided diagnostics, and educational technology.
==Early Life and Education==
Sivaswamy completed her bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, USA in 1984. She earned her MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Syracuse University, New York, USA, in 1986 and 1992, respectively. Her PhD thesis, advised by Harry Schwarzlander, was titled "A Conceptual Model for Motion Analysis in Computer and Biological Vision."
==Academic Career==
From 1993 to 2001, Sivaswamy served as a tenured professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She was a visiting faculty member at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India in 1992 and DISAM, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain, in 1998. She was also a visiting research fellow at the University of Warwick, UK and the University of Southampton, UK in 2004.
Sivaswamy joined IIIT Hyderabad in 2001 as an associate professor and was one of the founding faculty members of the Center for Visual Information Technology (CVIT), which has grown into the largest research group in India for computer vision, image processing, and computer graphics. She became a full professor in 2006. Since 2016, she has also been affiliated with the Kohli Center on Intelligent Systems.
At IIIT Hyderabad, Sivaswamy has held several significant positions. From 2015 to 2021, she served as the Dean of Academics and Controller of Examinations, overseeing the academic processes of the institute. She has been a member of the Governing Council of IIIT Hyderabad. Since 2022, she has been serving on the steering committee of the Raj Reddy Center for Technology and Society. As the Founding Chair of the Electronics and Communications Department, she led the department from its inception in 2004, guiding its academic and research initiatives. She heads the Signal Processing and Communications Research Center (SPCRC), directing various research projects. She also founded the Center for IT in Education to address problems in
education at the schools level. From 2015 to 2023, she chaired the admissions committee, introducing new channels to enhance diversity. Additionally, she was an affiliate faculty member at the Robotics Research Center (RRC) until 2010. She has been the inaugural Chair of the Student Life Committee, during which she founded Felicity, the institute's annual techno-cultural fest. 
==Research Interests and Contributions==
Sivaswamy's research began with an interest in understanding biological vision and later focused on medical image analysis. A significant area of her work has been in computer-aided diagnostics (CAD), collaborating extensively with institutions such as All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi (AIIMS), Aravind Eye Hospitals, LV Prasad Eye Institute, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology (SCTIMST), Radboud University in the Netherlands, Continental Hospitals and Care Hospitals. She has also partnered with industry, including GE Healthcare.
She co-authored the book "Hexagonal Image Processing: A Practical Approach" in 2005 with her former PhD student at the University of Auckland, Lee Middleton. She has published over 200 research papers in top-tier medical image analysis conferences and journals, including the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), the International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (TMI), and IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (JBHI). Sivaswamy has mentored several startups, advised over 30 master's thesis students, and supervised five PhD students. In 2021, she was featured in the Stanford list of top 2% researchers worldwide.
==Notable Research Works==
* Automated Screening for Glaucoma and Diabetic Retinopathy: Developed several methods for large-scale, automated screening of retinal diseases to address the scarcity of skilled personnel, a project extensively worked on for over a decade with multiple collaborating hospitals.
* Construction of Indian Brain Atlas: Spearheaded the creation of the first-ever Indian Brain Atlas (IBA), which found that the average Indian brain is smaller in height, width, and volume compared to Western and Eastern populations. This comprehensive atlas has provided invaluable insights into neuroanatomy and population-specific brain morphology.
* Virtual Reality for Indian Medical Colleges: Set up VR facilities to enhance the teaching of anatomy in medical colleges, integrating gross anatomy and radiological anatomy. These facilities have been installed in over 5 institutes to modernize medical education and have led to a startup. 
* Shared Medical Imaging Datasets: Instrumental in the collecting, annotating and public release of valuable medical imaging datasets, especially related to Indian population, to foster transparent and reproducible research in AI for medicine. Notable datasets include Dhrishti-GS and Dhrishti-GS1, which are widely used and highly cited worldwide in retinal imaging for optic nerve head segmentation and glaucoma assessment. Recently, her group released the IBA-100 dataset, comprising MRI scans of 100 young healthy adults from India, and the Indian Brain Segmentation Dataset (IBSD), with annotations for 14 subcortical structures from 114 healthy subjects. 
* Understanding Structural Differences in Indian Brain Aging: Her group is currently working on understanding structural differences in Indian brain aging by analyzing MRI data from Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Caucasian populations across different age groups from 20 - 80. The study includes a detailed intra- and inter-population analysis, revealing distinct aging trajectories, with notable findings including the delayed onset of gray matter reductions and ventricular expansion in the Japanese demographic.
* Computer-based Demonstrations for Secondary Schools: Initiated a project funded by Media Labs Asia in early 2000s (now Digital India, under MeitY) to aid in teaching science through computer-based demonstrations. The project emphasized enabling teachers to create their own content, distributing these tools to schools and displaying them at the Birla Science Museum.
* Virtual Labs for College Students: Led the development of over 35 virtual labs across diverse disciplines under the Phase 1 of the MHRD-funded project under the NPTEL scheme. This ambitious initiative aimed to enhance experiential learning and establish the institute as a frontrunner in virtual experimentation. The subsequent versions of the initiative have garnered over 4 million views, underscoring its significant impact on education.
==Key Professional Activities==
* Sivaswamy served as the General Chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) in 2022, held in Kolkata, India. 
* She founded and organized the MedImage Medical Image Processing Workshop at the Indian Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics & Image Processing (ICVGIP) for several editions.
* She is a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Conferences Board, contributing to the organization of IEEE conferences.
* She has served as a member of the research advisory council at Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology.
* In 2023, she was an organizing committee member for the MICCAI conference at Vancouver, Canada and chaired the Women in MICCAI conference committee.
* She is also a member of the organizing committee for the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP).
* She has served on the program committees of several conferences, including Information Processing in Medical Imaging (IPMI), International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Interventions (MICCAI) and has reviewed papers for top journals including IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (TMI) and Medical Image Analysis (MedIA).
==Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives==
As Chairperson of the Diversity Committee at IIIT Hyderabad, Sivaswamy introduced several initiatives to enhance student diversity:
* Diversity Pool in Admission Channels: Aimed to achieve at least 25% female representation in the 4-year BTech program since 2021.
* Special Channel of Admission (SPEC) : Created to attract students from underrepresented regions, selecting students based on separate entrance exams and interviews.
==Personal Life==
Jayanthi Sivaswamy is married to Prajit Kumar Basu, who retired as a professor from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hyderabad. 
Category:Indian computer scientists
Category:Indian people
Category:1956 births