Prof. Jagat Sesh Challa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS), Pilani. He earned his M.Sc. (Tech.) in Information Systems (2010), M.E. in Software Systems (2012), and Ph.D. in Computer Science (2019) from BITS Pilani, and later completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at Northwestern University in the United States in 2020. His research spans Big Data Analytics, Agentic AI for Education, and Human-Computer Interaction, with additional interests in Computer Vision, Federated Learning, and Materials Informatics.
Prof. Challa has published over 20 research papers and secured more than INR 20 million in research funding across multiple projects. He currently supervises seven Ph.D. candidates and mentors more than 30 undergraduate and master’s students annually. He is a member of ACM and IEEE and a founding member of the BITS Pilani × Postman Innovation Lab, which focuses on AR/VR, game development, and AI/ML applications.
In teaching, he specializes in foundational computer science courses such as Computer Programming, Logic in Computer Science, and Data Structures and Algorithms. He received the 2023 Coursera Global Innovation Outstanding Achievement Award for his “Introduction to Programming” course, part of the B.Sc. Computer Science program on Coursera. He also contributes to BITS Pilani’s Work Integrated Learning Programmes and serves as a consultant for the BITS Pilani Digital initiative, supporting the development of online degree programs in Data Science and AI.
