Dr. Viraj Kumar is a visiting Professor at IISc Bangalore and the Chair of ACM India’s Special Interest Group for CS Education (iSIGCSE). He has a keen interest in Computer Science pedagogy, with an emphasis on developing software tools for educational purposes. 

In collaboration with Microsoft Research India, Dr. Viraj Kumar is developing content and assessment strategies for Massively Empowered Classrooms. This project aims to provide instructors with high-quality course content that can be freely modified to suit a particular instructor’s purpose. Thus, unlike MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), MEC aims to empower instructors by giving them a strong foundation in terms of content and organization. Also, in collaboration with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Dr. Kumar is developing serious games for teaching concepts in Mathematics to school students. In addition, Dr. Kumar is actively developing industry-academia partnerships to give PES University students opportunities to work with companies and research labs in the area of Technology for Education.

Dr. Kumar has served in the Karnataka Knowledge Commission Task group on Educational Technology (2014-15), and is an organizer for the annual IEEE Technology for Education (T4E) conference. He has held faculty positions at NIIT University (Rajasthan, India), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Illinois, USA), and the College of the Holy Cross (Massachusetts, USA). 

He holds MS and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Additionally, he also holds an M.Sc. in Applied Statistics and Informatics from IIT-Bombay, and a B.Sc. in Mathematics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University.