Atul Kumar is a Senior Research Scientist and Manager at IBM Research India, Bengaluru, where he leads research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and software engineering. His work uses foundation models, AI agents and program analysis for code generation, code translation, testing and validation, with a particular focus on modernising enterprise mainframe applications. Recent contributions include symbolic-execution-driven test generation, automated testing and validation of COBOL-to-Java transformation, and knowledge-graph-based discovery of functionality in legacy applications; this work contributes to IBM Bob, Watsonx Code Assistant and IBM Z software products. Over a 23-year career in industrial research, he has also held research leadership roles at Siemens Corporate Research, ABB Corporate Research, Accenture Technology Labs and Microsoft India R&D. He has more than 40 peer-reviewed publications and over 20 patents filed or granted, and holds an MTech (1996) and a PhD (2003) in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kanpur.
Dr Kumar is active in building India’s computing research community. He chairs ACM SIGSOFT India (iSoft), serves on the Executive Committee of IKDD, the India chapter of ACM SIGKDD, and is a member of the Academic Council of Gati Shakti Vishwavidyalaya, Vadodara. He is the lead organiser from IKDD for the Indian National AI Olympiad (INAIO), which ACM India runs to select India’s team for the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence. He has held organising roles at ISEC, CODS-COMAD, CCGRID, AsiaCCS and many other conferences, and is a Senior Member of both ACM and IEEE.