Announcement: Outstanding Contribution to Computing Education (OCCE) Award, 2025
Outstanding Contributions for Computing Education (OCCE) Award, 2025
ACM India is delighted to announce Professor Tanmoy Chakraborty from IIT Delhi as the recipient of the Outstanding Contributions for Computing Education (OCCE) award for 2025.
The ACM India OCCE Award recognizes individuals who have made fundamental, innovative and impactful contributions to computing education in India. The award carries a prize of ₹7 lakhs. Financial support for this award is provided by Microsoft.
Chakraborty has made significant contributions to computing education in India, particularly in the areas of Social Computing and Generative AI. His work integrates research, curriculum design, and large-scale outreach, influencing how these subjects are taught and understood across academic and professional communities.
A central part of his impact comes through his textbooks Social Network Analysis (2021) and Introduction to Large Language Models (2024). These are among the first comprehensive academic texts from India on these topics and are used by universities in India and abroad. The books make advanced material accessible to a broad range of students. They combine theoretical rigor with practical exercises, case studies, and freely available teaching materials such as slides and recorded lectures. These books have been endorsed by international scholars and adopted in institutions including IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, ISI Kolkata, BITS Pilani, TU Darmstadt, and others. To extend the reach of his teaching, Chakraborty has created comprehensive online courses on the same subjects. His YouTube lecture series on Social Network Analysis and Large Language Models have been followed by learners worldwide. On NPTEL, his courses have collectively enrolled over 58,000 learners. The course on Large Language Models, launched in 2025, attracted such strong participation that NPTEL offered it in consecutive semesters. These efforts have helped introduce advanced computing topics to a large and diverse audience
Chakraborty’s research in computing education adds a systematic perspective to his teaching practice. His recent work in Education Sciences studied students’ perceptions of Generative AI in higher education across India and Northern Ireland. Earlier studies explored the development of computer science as a discipline, interdisciplinarity in research, and citation trends, with publications in venues such as Scientometrics and Communications of the ACM. His teaching has been recognized through several institutional and external awards, including multiple Best Teaching Awards for NLP and Information Retrieval courses, the Google TensorFlow Faculty Award, and the Faculty Excellence Award at IIIT Delhi. He has introduced new courses such as Social Network Analysis, Mining Large Networks, Natural Language Processing, and Introduction to LLMs. He has also led faculty development programs and organized short schools on artificial intelligence and data analytics.
Chakraborty has supervised more than 80 undergraduate and postgraduate theses and graduated nine PhD students, with several more in progress. His students have published in leading conferences such as EMNLP, ACL and SIGIR and gone on to pursue advanced studies or work in major research institutions and companies. In his academic leadership roles, including Head of the Infosys Centre for AI at IIIT Delhi and coordinator for M.Tech programs at IIT Delhi and IIIT Delhi, he has helped strengthen educational programs and research collaboration.
Taken together, Chakraborty’s books, online courses, research, mentorship, and institutional leadership reflect a sustained and influential contribution to computing education in India and beyond.
Please join us in congratulating Prof. Tanmoy Chakraborty.
