Dr. Surender Varma Gadhiraju

He is an alumnus of IIT Roorkee (Masters) and IIT Bombay (PhD), with over 10 years of industry experience as a technical leader in data science and machine learning.  

His PhD focused on devising novel change detection methodologies for time series satellite imagery. He has also collaborated with Telecom ParisTech as a researcher. After completing PhD, he transitioned to industry, where he led projects and teams in Digital Agriculture (Dupont) and Mapping (Here Tech) domains. He has also cofounded a startup in the Fintech sector. Apart from his research work, he has taken initiatives for skills upgradation, including organizing workshops, seminars and mentoring software engineers transition to data science. 

In addition to providing cutting-edge industry solutions, he has been actively involved in academia leading collaborations, serving as an invited speaker in Faculty Recharge Programmes, and as a member of the Board of Studies.

He has extensive experience in remote sensing, spanning 15 years. His work focused on diverse areas such as land use and land cover studies, monitoring changes in desert sand dunes, identifying acreage, characterizing plant health, and enabling drone assessment of crops. 

He has successfully applied deep learning and vector processing techniques to extract roads and road signs from satellite imagery, contributing to the construction of high-definition maps. Notably, he has also proposed and established an NVIDIA-based deep learning cluster, enhancing research capabilities and resulting in significant cost savings for the group.  

He has also made notable contributions to the financial markets, with experience in building equity portfolios and developing a real estate marketplace, showcasing his versatility across domains. 

Image Processing| Machine Learning | Data Science| Digital Agriculture | Mapping | Fintech | Geoinformatics

His teaching philosophy is rooted in active learning, inspire learning rather than just knowledge dissemination and to give students a sense of how the learning could be related to real world. 

He believes in a flexible manner of instruction, responsive to the unique atmosphere of a given class having both theory and practical components.  

By the end of course every student regardless of background, should be able to improve his or her ability to programme, clearly communicate learnings and develop product models.

Dr. Surender taught both theory and practical courses on Geoinformatics, Digital Image Processing and Machine Learning.

He won two awards one for national conference (Geomatrix11) and another in an international conference (Geomatrix12). 

surender.gadhiraju@ddn.upes.ac.in