Akhil Arora is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Aarhus University, where he heads the CLAN for AI Research on Language and Networks (or “CLAN” for short). He is a fellow of the Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science (SODAS), an affiliate of the Pioneer Centre for AI (P1), and a formal collaborator of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that manages Wikipedia and related projects. Akhil’s research aims to model and enhance human knowledge-seeking by devising methods and tools blending techniques from natural language processing, artificial intelligence, graph machine learning, and computational social science, and thus, he prefers using the umbrella term “human-centered AI” to characterize his research.
Akhil received his PhD in Computer Science from EPFL (2024) in Switzerland, his MS from IIT Kanpur (2013), and his undergraduate degree from NCU Gurgaon (2010). In days of yore, he spent close to five years in the industry working with the research labs of Xerox and American Express as a Research Scientist. His work on influence maximization has been recognized as the 8th most influential paper of SIGMOD 2017 by Paper Digest and received the 2018 ACM SIGMOD Most Reproducible Paper Award. He is a recipient of the prestigious EDIC Doctoral Fellowship, an alumnus of the coveted Heidelberg Laureate Forum, and a DAAD AINet fellow on human-centered AI.