Prof. Sandeep Juneja: IIT, Stanford, COVID Modeling, and AI in Math

In this episode of Decoded, Akshat Bhaskar and Amaira Akbar sit down with Professor Sandeep Juneja, Professor of Computer Science at Ashoka University and Director of the Safexpress Centre for Data, Learning and Decision Sciences, previously Senior Professor and Dean at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai.

Sandeep walks us through his journey from a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering at IIT Delhi to a Ph.D. in Operations Research at Stanford, and how that early grounding in applied probability shaped a career spent modeling uncertainty across finance, epidemiology, and climate.

We go deep on his time at TIFR Mumbai during COVID, when his epidemiological models were used to track and predict the spread of the virus through one of the world's most densely populated cities. The conversation then turns to the present: what the recent wave of AI progress actually changes, where the hype outruns the substance, and the specific case of AI being used to attack the Navier-Stokes equations, one of the longest-standing unsolved problems in mathematics.

A conversation that moves from IIT lecture halls to Stanford seminar rooms to the streets of Mumbai during a pandemic, and lands on the open question of what AI can and cannot yet do.

Thank you to Anubhav Bhattacharjee, Vidyanshi Mittal, Akshara Durugkar, Soujanya Banik, and Mohammad Arif Abdullah for their help with research, outreach, and questions for this episode. clarity before consensus.