Raghuram Malpe Pai

Title of the Talk: Rules and Reason: Marrying Deterministic Systems with Probabilistic AI

Abstract :
For decades, artificial intelligence has swung between two poles: the rigor of symbolic, rule-based systems and the flexibility of statistical, learning-based ones. That pendulum framing has always been a false choice. This keynote argues that the most capable and most trustworthy real-world systems deliberately combine both, applying deterministic rules where correctness and auditability matter, and probabilistic reasoning where ambiguity and novelty dominate. Drawing on nearly two decades of building mission-critical systems in which a deterministic core stays authoritative and the reasoning layer remains advisory, Raghuram Pai offers a practical taxonomy for allocating responsibility between these two minds: which decisions belong to rules, which belong to reasoning, and why the order matters for dependability. The talk is foundational rather than product-specific, and closes with open research questions on principled hybrid design. It is intended for researchers and practitioners shaping the next generation of hybrid intelligent systems, where soft computing and deterministic engineering meet.

Bio :
Raghuram Pai is a Principal Engineer and Senior Architect at HPE Networking (formerly Juniper Networks), with more than 19 years building mission-critical networking and cloud-native platforms across the US, India, and China. He is a prolific inventor with multiple patents spanning edge telemetry, adaptive metric collection, device-aware sensing, AI-driven fault detection, and the architect of systems ranging from streaming telemetry pipelines to a software platform behind over $1B in annual recurring revenue. Today he architects trustworthy, agentic AIOps for network automation. He is a recipient of the highest individual technical honors at both HPE/Juniper and Huawei.