Shamak Dutta

I am a postdoctoral researcher in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Waterloo working with Yash Pant and Stephen L. Smith. I received my PhD in ECE and have spent time at Preferred Networks in Tokyo, Latent Logic (now Waymo) in Oxford, and Amazon Search & Advertising in Palo Alto.

My research interests lie in developing efficient algorithms for sensing and control under resource constraints with applications in information acquisition in robotics and estimation in dynamical systems.

I can be reached at shamak dot dutta at uwaterloo dot ca.

Teaching

I was a teaching assistant for several courses including Algorithms (ECE 250, ECE 406) and Probability Theory & Statistics (ECE 203, ECE 307). I enjoy teaching and have consistently received high student evaluations through course reviews. Here are some examples of student feedback:

"Just phenomenal, he is extremely clear during tutorials. He has a direct and easy to understand lesson plan that starts with review and finishes with questions. Everything is clearly explained, I think I understood more from the tutorials than lectures." (ECE 307)
"Hands down the smartest and most knowledgeable and helpful TA I have ever interacted with. Thanks for all the help Shamak and all the best, you are going places!" (ECE 250)
"Very clear and helpful. Seemed to have a good knowledge of the course material and was helpful when I asked him questions. He is a very clear communicator." (ECE 250)
"Banger tutorials." (ECE 203)

Publications & Preprints

Informative Path Planning for Active Regression with Gaussian Processes via Sparse Optimization.
Shamak Dutta, Nils Wilde, and Stephen L. Smith
IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2025.

A Unified Approach to Optimally Solving Sensor Scheduling and Sensor Selection Problems in Kalman Filtering. [arXiv]
Shamak Dutta, Nils Wilde, and Stephen L. Smith
IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Singapore, 2023.

Approximation Algorithms for Tours in Random Fields with Guaranteed Estimation Accuracy. [arXiv]
Shamak Dutta, Nils Wilde, Pratap Tokekar, and Stephen L. Smith
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), London, UK, 2023.

Informative Path Planning in Random Fields via Mixed Integer Programming. [arXiv]
Shamak Dutta, Nils Wilde, and Stephen L. Smith
IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Cancun, Mexico, 2022.

An Improved Greedy Algorithm for Subset Selection in Linear Estimation. [PDF]
Shamak Dutta, Nils Wilde, and Stephen L. Smith
European Control Conference (ECC), London, United Kingdom, 2022.

Convolutional Neural Networks Regularized by Correlated Noise. [PDF]
Shamak Dutta, Bryan Tripp, and Graham Taylor.
Conference on Computer and Robot Vision, Toronto (CRV), Canada, 2018.

Barcodes for Medical Image Retrieval Using Autoencoded Radon Transform. [PDF]
H.R. Tizhoosh, Christopher Mitcheltree, Shujin Zu, Shamak Dutta.
International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), Cancun, Mexico, 2016.

Theses

Resource Constrained Linear Estimation in Sensor Scheduling and Informative Path Planning. [PDF]
PhD Thesis, University of Waterloo. 2024.

Correlated Noise in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. [PDF]
MASc Thesis, University of Waterloo. 2019.

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