Rate My Professor Tony Savarimuthu

Professor Tony Savarimuthu, full name Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu, holds the position of Professor in the Department of Information Science within the School of Computing at the University of Otago. He earned a Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) in Chemical Engineering (1996–2000) and a Master of Engineering in Software Systems (2000–2002) from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, Rajasthan, India. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy in Information Science (2003–2011) at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, with his thesis placed on the Dean's exceptional thesis list. Prior to his academic career in New Zealand, he worked as a Software Engineer at Coralgrid Software Ltd (now part of Triple Point Technology, Inc.) in Chennai, India (2002–2003), and as a part-time Assistant Lecturer at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science off-campus centre in Chennai, as well as a Teaching Assistant at BITS Pilani. At the University of Otago, his career progressed from Teaching Assistant (2003–2004), Teaching Fellow (2004–2006), Lecturer (2006–2013), Senior Lecturer (2013–2017), and Associate Professor (2017–2023) to full Professor in February 2023. He currently directs the Software Engineering programme and the Business Analytics minor offered at the Otago Business School, and leads the role of course advisor in the School of Computing.

Savarimuthu's research focuses on multi-agent systems—a branch of artificial intelligence, particularly normative multi-agent systems—software engineering, information systems, and computing education, employing data science and analytics techniques. His work involves developing socially aware software, such as for robots, that learns human concepts including social norms, trust, and reputation for interactions; analyzing developer social networks and decision-making from repositories; extracting insights from app reviews; and AI applications for social good like crime mapping from newspaper data, offensive language detection in online communities, preventing useless data generation, and addressing energy poverty. Key publications include 'Norm creation, spreading and emergence: A survey of simulation models of norms in multi-agent systems' (Savarimuthu & Cranefield, 2011, cited 210 times), 'Extracting crime information from online newspaper articles' (Arulanandam, Savarimuthu & Purvis, 2014, cited 126 times), 'Social norm emergence in virtual agent societies' (Savarimuthu et al., 2009, cited 104 times), and recent papers such as 'Evaluating LLM alignment with human trust models' (Debnath et al., 2026) and 'Can LLMs reason about trust? A pilot study' (Debnath et al., 2025). With 2,783 citations on Google Scholar, his contributions have impacted artificial intelligence and software engineering fields. He has supervised numerous PhD, Masters, and Honours students to completion and teaches courses like COMP 120 Practical Data Science and INFO 201 Developing Information Systems I. In October 2024, he delivered his Inaugural Professorial Lecture.