Shashank Gupta

Hello, I’m Shashank.

I’m a Senior Applied Scientist at Microsoft AI. I build machine learning systems that learn safely and effectively from human behavior.

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About

A little about me.

I am a Senior Applied Scientist at Microsoft AI, working on machine learning for ads. My broader research asks a practical question: how can intelligent systems learn safely and effectively from the people who use them?

I completed my PhD at the Information Retrieval Lab at the University of Amsterdam, supervised by Prof. Maarten de Rijke and Prof. Harrie Oosterhuis. My thesis focused on off-policy evaluation and learning for ranking and recommendation systems.

During my PhD, I worked with Meta AI’s Modern Recommender Systems teams in London and New York on two-stage recommendation and reinforcement learning for text-to-image diffusion models. Before that, I built search-ranking and query-understanding systems at Flipkart.

Experience

Industry & research
Education

Microsoft AI

Senior Applied Scientist
Ads · Bengaluru

Meta AI · New York

Research Scientist Intern
RL for diffusion models

Meta AI · London

Research Scientist Intern
Two-stage recommendation

Flipkart

Data Scientist
Search ranking & query understanding

Conduent Labs (erstwhile Xerox Research)

Research Intern
Fake-news detection

Tata Research Design and Development Center (TRDDC)

Research Intern
Adverse-drug reaction extraction

University of Amsterdam

PhD · Information Retrieval
Ranking & reinforcement learning

IIIT Hyderabad

MS by Research
Search & information extraction

Latest updates

Research, talks, and milestones

2026

2025

Earlier updates 2017—2024

2024

2023

  • [Oct 2023] Tutorial proposal on recent advancements in unbiased learning-to-rank accepted at WSDM 2024, and FIRE 2023.
  • [Sept 2023] Invited talk at ShareChat on Safe Unbiased Learning-to-Rank slides, video.
  • [August 2023] Invited talk at Meta AI, New York on Safe Unbiased Learning-to-Rank.
  • [July 2023] Joined Meta AI, London as a Research Scientist Intern, where I’ll be working with the Modern Recommender Systems (MRS) team on off-policy learning for two-stage recommender systems.
  • [July 2023] Two papers (extended abstracts) were accepted at the CONSEQUENCES workshop, co-located with RecSys’23. First work is a SIGIR resubmission on safe unbiased learning-to-rank; second work is on examining & mitigating selection bias in preference elicitation for recommender systems.
  • [June 2023] Paper on “A Deep Generative Recommendation Method for Unbiased Learning from Implicit Feedback” was accepted at ICTIR’23, co-located with SIGIR’23.
  • [May 2023] Paper on user return time prediction was accepted at the CRUM workshop at UMAP 2023. This paper was part of the work done while I was at Flipkart, India.
  • [April 2023] Tutorial proposal on recent advancements in unbiased learning-to-rank was accepted at SIGIR’23. I will be leading the tutorial discussion at the conference.
  • [April 2023] One full paper on safe unbiased learning-to-rank was accepted at SIGIR 2023.
  • [Feb 2023] PC member for SIGIR’23, NeurIPS’23.

2021-2022

  • [August 2022] Work on VAE-IPS was accepted at the CONSEQUENCES+REVEAL Workshop (as oral presentation) at RecSys’22.
  • [June’21 - June’22] Reviewed for ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, ICML, NeuRIPS’22.
  • [Sept’21 - Nov’21] TA for the Advanced Information Retrieval course.
  • [May 2021] Reviewing for NeurIPS, EMNLP, ICLR 21.
  • [April 2021] Joined IRLab, UvA as a PhD student

Pre-PhD

  • [July 2020] PC Member for EACL’2020.
  • [April 2020] Position paper accepted at the ECNLP@ACL’20.
  • [April 2020] Paper accepted at SIGIR’20.
  • [April 2020] PC Member for EMNLP’20 (IE Track) & AACL-IJCNLP 2020 (IE + IR Track).
  • [Dec 2019] PC Member for WSDM’20 Workshop on State-based User Modelling.
  • [Nov 2019] Reviewing for ICML 2020. [Update as of March ‘20] - Couldn’t review papers due to bad health.
  • [July 2019] Program Committee Member for ECIR 2020.
  • [June 2019] Reviewing for a special edition “Learning from User Interaction” of Information Retrieval Journal (IRJ).
  • [March 2019] Invited talk at Alumni Research Talks event organized at BITS, Pilani. I talked about “Information Retrieval from Social Media” slides.
  • [Oct 2018] Serving as PC member for ECIR’19 and ML4H@NeurIPS’18.
  • [July 2018] Joined Flipkart as a Data Scientist with the Search team.
  • [June 2018] Internship work @Conduent Labs on “Fake News Detection” was accepted at ASONAM’18 (Short Paper).
  • [June 2018] Journal paper from my summer internship work @TRDDC, Pune was published at BMC Bioinformatics (Impact Factor: 2.448).
  • [June 2018] Serving as PC Member for ICON 2018 and DTMBio 2018 @CIKM’18.
  • [January 2018] Joined Conduent Labs, Bangalore (previously known as Xerox Research Center India (XRCI)) as Research Intern with Manjira Sinha and Sandya Mannarswamy.
  • [December 2017] Two papers were accepted at ECIR 2018.
  • [November 2017] Two papers were accepted at the NeurIPS 2017 Machine Learning for Health (ML4H) Workshop.
  • [November 2017] Invited talk on “Deep Learning for Recommender Systems” at Thiagarajar College of Engineering (TCE) and “Machine Learning & Information Retrieval Techniques for Adverse Drug Reaction Mention Extraction from Social Media” at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore.
  • [September 2017] Two papers on Content-Based News Recommendation Systems were accepted at the ICDM workshop on Semantic Recommendation Systems (SeRECSys).
  • [August 2017] Paper on ‘Semi-Supervised Recurrent Neural Network for Adverse Drug Reaction Mention Extraction’ was accepted at ACM 11th International Workshop on Data and Text Mining in Biomedical Informatics at CIKM 2017.
  • [July 2017] Paper on Knowledge Base integration with text classification pipeline was accepted at the SIGIR workshop (KG4IR).
  • [June 2017] Paper on Trust Prediction in Social Media using Neural Networks was accepted at ASONAM’17.
  • [May 2017] My work on Hate Speech Detection from social media was covered in some leading publication houses in India. Source
  • [April 2017] I received the Best Poster award at WWW’17 for my work on Hate Speech Detection from social media.
  • [Feb 2017] Poster paper accepted at WWW’17.
  • [Feb 2017] Workshop paper accepted at WWW’17.