ARCS 2026

ACM-W India Annual Summit for Women in Computing

ACM Annual Summit for Women in Computing celebrates every year the incredible achievements and contributions of women in the field of computing. This annual summit is a testament to the remarkable progress we have made in promoting gender diversity and inclusion in the world of technology.

Co-located with ACM India Annual Event and ARCS, the summit creates a platform for sharing knowledge, ideas and experiences, thereby facilitating the career growth of women in computing. The summit creates a forum for recognizing the immense talent and potential of women in computing and also provides an opportunity for the participants to interact with the experienced researchers from academia and industry across the globe. The main highlight of the summit is the keynote address by the Outstanding Contributions in Computing by a Woman (OCCW) award winner.

This year’s edition of ACM-W India Annual summit provides a comprehensive exploration of the role of collaboration and confidence in women’s leadership, providing both insights and actionable advice for attendees, by bringing the correct mix of industry and academia leaders across the country. We will share more details soon.

ACM India’s PhD Clinic was launched in Sept 2020, facilitates CS PhD students from all over the country to obtain inputs and advice from diverse expert mentors located in premier academic institutions and industry. The PhD Clinic has been very successful in helping students, with some representative feedback from students:

“The way she answered the questions was so good! She shared personal experiences as well and that made me connect to her.”

“He guided me in such a nice way about how to find a research topic, what areas can be there and how I should align my research in a proper manner.”

In ARCS 2026, you will get to meet fantastic mentors, we will have 1-on-1 in-person Clinic sessions for PhD students. Selected students will get travel support to attend ARCS and interact with mentors. It is mandatory to attend all days of the conference and the Clinic sessions for students who are getting supported by the conference.
If you are interested in getting feedback, and having a discussion with any of them, please register to interact.

Mentors for PhD Clinic:

• Prof. Ayon Chakraborty, IIT Madras – Wireless Networks, Mobile Computing, IoT
• Prof. Radhika Mamadi, IIIT Hyderabad – Computational Linguistics
• Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, IIIT Hyderabad – Data Science for Social Good, Responsible AI, NLP, Social Network Analysis
• Prof. Mainack Mondal, IIT Kharagpur – Social Networks/Cybersecurity/Usable Privacy and Security
• Prof. Sathya Peri, IIT Hyderabad – Parallel Computing, Distributed Systems, Algorithm analysis, Networking algorithms
• Prof. Manas Thakur, IIT Bombay – Program analysis, Compiler optimizations, Programming languages
• Prof. Venkatesh Raman, (Retd) IMSc – Succinct Data Structures, Parameterized Complexity
• Dr. Urbi Chatterjee, IIT Kanpur – Hardware Security, PUFs, Side Channel Analysis, Approximate Computing
• Dr. Sarani Bhattacharya, IIT Kharagpur – Computer Architecture, Micro-architectural security, Hardware Security, Secure systems
• Dr. Sruthi Sekar, IIT Bombay – Cryptography, Theoretical Computer Science
• Dr. Niyati Chhaya, Hyperbots Inc – NLP- Generation, summarization, attribution & reasoning/ Multimodal AI/ Finance AI/ Affective computing
• Dr. Ayan Mondal, IIT Indore – IoT, Edge Computing
• Dr. Karthik Ramachandra, Microsoft Research – Large scale databases, data management systems
• Dr. Joseph K J, Adobe Research – Deep Learning 
• Dr. Vaishnavi Sundararajan, IIT Delhi – Formal methods, Verification and Security

Registration Start:  Click here to Register

Timeline
Registration form open: December 1, 2025
Registration Deadline: December 23, 2025
PhD Clinic accepted students notification: December 30, 2025
Confirmation by students to attend PhD Clinic: January 7, 2026
Clinic sessions: February 11, 12 & 13, 2026