Highlights from the last 6 Months and What’s coming next. We look forward to your active participation

January 27, 2026

Dear ACM India members,

Wish you a fantastic 2026!

As we start 2026, the ACM India Council presents the highlights of our activities for the past six months and shares our plans for the months ahead. Your enthusiastic participation has helped shape our initiatives and we look forward to your continued engagement this year too.

Below is a summary of the various activities for the past six months:

  • ACM India awards for the year 2025 have been announced [arranged in alphabetical order], we look forward to recognizing many more in the future.
    • Doctoral Dissertation Award: Dr. Dharaben Rameshbhai Thakkar, IIT Gandinagar
    • Early Career Research Award: Dr. Vivek Seshadri, Karya
    • Outstanding Applied Innovation in Computing Award [our newest Award]:
      • Recipient: IBM Research:
      • Honorable mention: IIIT Hyderabad & Tata Trusts
    • Outstanding Computing Career by Women Award: Prof. S Krishna, IIT Bombay
    • Outstanding Computing Career Education Award: Prof. Tanmoy Chakraborty, IIT Delhi
  • Team India did an amazing at the AI Olympiad 2025, by securing 3 Gold, 2 Silver, 1 Bronze and 1 Honourable Mention. India AI Olympiad (INAIO) is organized by ACM India in partnership with ACM KDD, towards encouraging innovation in artificial intelligence among school students. The results of Bebras India Computational Thinking Challenge 2025 were announced. We had around 2.5 Lakhs students from 24 states participating in 12 different languages.
  • The ACM India Chapter Summit held in Indore was well attended by hundreds of student chapter representatives and faculty sponsors, with many talks from researchers in India, along with presentations from the award-winning chapters.
  • COMPUTE, and CODS conferences were held in partnership with ACM India, spanning research in the areas of Computing Education, and Data Science. Another new initiative of ACM India, IndiCS, successfully completed the hosting of its second seminar in the Mysore campus of Infosys and third in Amrita University.
  • The Winter Schools of ACM India were held in six different locations and again well attended by senior under-graduate and postgraduate students. Three Research Opportunities in Computer Science (ROCS) workshops were held between August and December 2025, special thanks to the hosts and the attendees. ROCS is scheduled to be held in SRM - AP, look out for details. Our industry and education webinars continue to happen, please register and participate to augment your knowledge.
  • Over the last six months, we have added Infosys, Zoho Corporation and Ola Electric as our sponsors. We greatly appreciate the support provided by these organizations, without which it would be difficult to carry out many of the activities we undertake.
  • Through our travel grants, over the last six months we have supported 55+ students, faculty, and researchers in attending conferences.
  • On the research support front, we have 40 ACM India Anveshan Setu fellows so far this year, some visits completed, some ongoing and a second call for applications coming up soon! Many PhD students have benefited by interacting with more than 35 fantastic mentors cutting across various topics of CS / IT. If you are interested in speaking with a mentor, request for a slot with a mentor here.

Important upcoming events are highlighted below:

  • The ACM India Annual Event 2026 will be held on 14 Feb 2026 at IIT Hyderabad. We look forward to your enthusiastic participation [Register by 12th Feb] in the event which will host talks by Prof. Raj Reddy, Carnegie Mellon University; Dr. Pratyush Kumar, Co-Founder, SARVAM AI; Prof. Abhik Roychoudhury, National University of Singapore, Prof. Soumen Chakrabarti, IIT Bombay, and the awards ceremony. ARCS Symposium (11 - 13 Feb) for research scholars, will be co-located with the Annual event along with the ACM India-W Summit. This year we have introduced Day 0 for ARCS, which will have workshops, panel discussion, and a job fair focussed on PhD students. We thank the sponsors of these events wholeheartedly.
  • Please feel free to write to: [email protected] with your suggestions, ideas, and questions. Follow us and tag us for relevant activities on X, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram! Please tag us and help amplify the content that we post on social media.
  • We invite nominations (including self-nominations) for electing 7 members to the Executive Council. Nominations are open to ACM Professional Members in India and must be submitted by 12 February 2026.

Meenakshi, Sachin, & PK
On behalf of the ACM India Council