Curriculum Vitae
Sambit Mishra
PhD Student, Electrical & Computer Engineering · University of Southern California · Advised by Prof. Urbashi Mitra.
§ 01
Research interests
Causal inference and probabilistic graphical models, with emphasis on identifiability theory and scalable continuous-optimization methods for causal discovery. Interested in efficient discovery algorithms for identifiable DAGs, variance bounds for non-/partially-identifiable cases, and high-dimensional, mixed-distribution data.
§ 02
Education
Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering
Aug 2025 — PresentUniversity of Southern California (USC) · Los Angeles, CA, USA
- ▹Advisor: Prof. Urbashi Mitra, Ming Hsieh Department of ECE
- ▹GPA: 4.00/4.00
- ▹Key coursework: Probability Theory, Linear Algebra, Supervised Machine Learning, Inference & Estimation Theory.
B.Tech. (Hons.), Electronics and Communication Engineering
2021 — 2025Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bhubaneswar · Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India
- ▹Advisor: Dr. Soumya P. Dash
- ▹GPA: 9.14/10.00
§ 03
Research experience
Graduate Research Assistant
Aug 2025 — PresentMing Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, USC · Los Angeles, CA, USA
- ▹Developing continuous-optimization methods for scalable DAG estimation using differentiable acyclicity constraints, reducing iterations and enabling large-scale batching.
- ▹Designed a soft-intervention selection framework that improves causal-discovery efficiency and lowers experimental cost.
- ▹Studying identifiability of causal graphs under finite samples and latent-variable settings.
- ▹Built GPU-accelerated structure-learning pipelines in PyTorch using Adam and L-BFGS for non-convex optimization.
Undergraduate Researcher
Aug 2024 — May 2025School of Electrical and Computer Sciences, IIT Bhubaneswar · Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India
- ▹Developed SER-optimized modulation schemes for RIS-assisted non-coherent communication systems.
- ▹Conducted error analysis for multi-level ASK modulations, optimizing energy efficiency.
§ 04
Publications
- [1]
C. Peng, S. Mishra, U. Mitra
“Learning to Intervene: Optimized Soft Intervention Selection for Causal Discovery.”
Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Barcelona, Spain, 2026, pp. 6196–6200.
doi: 10.1109/ICASSP55912.2026.11460954 - [2]
S. Mishra, S. P. Dash, G. C. Alexandropoulos
IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking, vol. 10, pp. 1433–1445, 2026.
doi: 10.1109/TGCN.2025.3633182 - [3]
S. Mishra, S. P. Dash
IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, vol. 15, pp. 300–304, 2026.
doi: 10.1109/LWC.2025.3624154
§ 05
Industry experience
ASIC Engineering Intern, CHI VIP Team
May 2024 — Jul 2024NVIDIA Corporation · Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
- ▹Verified CHI protocol compliance for CPU/GPU IPs using SystemVerilog and Perl automation.
- ▹Ensured interoperability between internal and external verification IPs.
§ 06
Awards & academic distinctions
- ★B.Tech. Project Proficiency Award — Best B.Tech Thesis, ECE Department, IIT Bhubaneswar (2024–25).
- ★All India Rank 4000 among ~1,000,000 candidates in JEE Advanced 2021, India.
- ★National Talent Search Scholarship — Top 2000 students of ~1,200,000 candidates in NTSE 2019, Government of India.
§ 07
Technical skills
Causal Inference
- Causal Discovery
- Bayesian Networks
- Structural Equation Models
Optimization
- Adam
- RMSProp
- L-BFGS
- Convex Optimization
- Bilevel Optimization
Programming & Tools
- Python
- PyTorch
- NumPy
- SciPy
- C++
- CUDA
- MATLAB
- Git
- LaTeX
§ 08
Positions of responsibility
General Secretary
May 2023 — May 2024Science and Technology Council, Students’ Gymkhana, IIT Bhubaneswar
- ▹Coordinated and managed five technical societies and two fests, ensuring proper allocation of funds among them.
- ▹Led IIT Bhubaneswar’s Inter-IIT Tech Meet 2023 team, achieving an overall 10th rank among 23 IITs.