Saptarshi Chakraborty:

I’m grateful to the KAG travel grant for supporting my travel to the International Conference on
Machine Learning (ICML), 2022 at Baltimore to present my spotlight paper, “Bregman power k-
means for Exponential Family Data”. ICML is the annual flagship conference of the machine
learning community. In addition to the main conference sessions, the conference also includes
an expo, tutorials, and workshops. Researchers from all over the world gather to discuss and
present their ideas on different aspects of ML. The poster sessions were incredibly interactive
as one could engage in discussions with the authors about their papers. As an author, it was
heartwarming to receive so many questions during these sessions. Though I had published in
top-tier ML conferences during covid, I was missing out on the true vibrant and proactive nature
of in-person interactions in these big ML conferences. Attending the conference in person was
also very helpful in networking with people who are also working on similar research topics. The
conference helped me to learn more about the state-of-the-art in current research on different
interesting topics in ML.
The KAG travel grant was incredibly beneficial as I didn’t have to worry about travel expenses or
finding outside funds to support my travel. I believe this opportunity creates a very positive
atmosphere for students, like myself, in engaging in collaborations even outside the university. I
sincerely thank the department for providing me with this opportunity.