Dr. Sumit Gulwani is a Distinguished Scientist and Vice President at Microsoft, where he spearheads scientific advancements in AI technologies and their integration into mass-market products. Dr. Sumit began his professional career at Microsoft Research in 2005. His pioneering work, starting with the famous Flash Fill feature in Excel (now featured in middle-school computing textbooks), has significantly shaped the field of AI-assisted Programming. It demonstrated that programs can be generated efficiently from imprecise specifications, leading to automation across a wide range of tasks for developers, low-code/no-code users, and even within education to enhance learning experiences for students.
Since 2015, Dr. Sumit has led a blended research and engineering team funded by multiple Microsoft business units, enabling him to deliver popular AI features in numerous Microsoft products. These include the Formula-by-Example feature in Excel, PowerApps, PowerAutomate, Data connectors in PowerQuery, by-example cmdlets in PowerShell, IntelliCode Suggestions in Visual Studio, and recently various features in multiple Copilots. Dr. Sumit’s intrapreneurship exemplifies how deep foundational research can directly influence product development and vice versa.
Dr. Sumit’s groundbreaking work in neuro-symbolic AI, which combines neural methods like large language models with logical-reasoning-based symbolic techniques, has been recognized with several awards. He is the first industrial researcher to receive the prestigious Max Planck-Humboldt Medal and holds the rare distinction of earning three Most Influential Paper awards for his first three major papers in program synthesis. With 170+ research publications and 13 paper awards, he is also a Fellow of the ACM and AAIA, and a recipient of the ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award.
Beyond his research, Dr. Sumit initiated the PROSE Research Fellowship Program in India, a remote apprenticeship model designed to scale impact while nurturing globally diverse talent. He is an ACM Distinguished Speaker, having delivered over 70 keynotes and invited talks. He is a champion of storytelling training and initiatives, emphasizing the power of narrative in technology.
He earned his PhD at UC-Berkeley (where he received the ACM SIGPLAN Doctoral Dissertation Award) and undergraduate degree in computer science at IIT Kanpur in 2000 (where he was awarded the President’s Gold Medal).
Honoring his Stellar Contribution in recognition of his stellar contributions to scientific advancements in AI-assisted programming and their integration into mass-market products, IT Kanpur confers upon Dr. Sumit Gulwani the Distinguished Alumnus Award 2024.
