Achievements and Awards
IIIT Hyderabad has been ranked No. 1 in both the Overall (All India) and South Zone categories in DataQuest’s Best T-School Survey 2026. In addition in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2026 for Computer Science, the institute has moved up from the 601–650 band last year to the 551–600 band this year.
Prof. Ashok Kumar Das has achieved a significant milestone in his research journey, with his Google Scholar profile reflecting an h-index of 100, over 31,550 citations, and an i10-index of 373. This accomplishment highlights the sustained impact, relevance, and wide recognition of his research contributions over the years.
BITS Hyderabad Quiz Club organized BITS Pearl Quizmos on 21 and 22 February where IIIT-H teams secured top honors in the Travel, Lifestyle and Culture Quiz and the Sports Quiz. In the Travel, Lifestyle and Culture Quiz, Prabhav and Monish clinched first place, winning a cash prize of ₹6,000. The team of Ashwin, Pranay, and Prabhav achieved second place in the Sports Quiz, earning ₹4,000. Additionally, in the General Quiz, the team comprising Vinayak, Arush, and Prabhav received a Special Mention as the best-performing college team.
Dr. Bhaktee Dongaonkar and her students Kunal Angadi, 4th year CSD; Maneesh Manoj, 4th year CSD and Hurshitha Vasudevan received the best presentation award for their paper on Relationship of Age, Cognition and Brain Structural Volume in Healthy Indian Adults at the International Conference on Clinical Neuropsychology and Cognitive Neuroscience (I-CNCNC) held at NIMHANS, Bengaluru from 5 to 7 March.
Dr. Aakansha Natani and her student Sujal Deoda’s paper on the etymology of keywords in AI, piqued the curiosity of AI experts and social scientists and earned him an all-expenses paid trip to the 2nd annual conference of the International Association for Safe & Ethical AI (IASEAI) held in Paris from 24 – 25 February 2026.
Research work on Low-cost IoT-based Downtime Detection for UPS and Behaviour Analysis, carried out by Dr. Sachin Chaudhari along with his student Sannidhya Gupta, 5th-year Dual Degree student and Prakash Nayak, IT staff member, has been awarded the Best Paper Award at the 18th International Conference on Communication Systems & Networks (COMSNETS 2026) from 6 – 10 January 2026.
Research work on Methylation-based Markers in Breast Cancer: Insights from Functional and Co-Methylation Network Analysis by Dr. Nita Parekh and her students Sri Lakshmi Bhavani Pagolu and Suba S received the Best Poster Award by Digital Discovery (Royal Society of Chemistry) at the International Conference on Modeling Chemical and Biological (Re)Activity (MCBR-2025) held in Hyderabad from 11 to 14 December 2025.
Research work on Methylation-based Markers in Breast Cancer: Insights from Functional and Co-Methylation Network Analysis by Dr. Nita Parekh and her students Sri Lakshmi Bhavani Pagolu and Suba S received the Best Poster Award by Digital Discovery (Royal Society of Chemistry) at the International Conference on Modeling Chemical and Biological (Re)Activity (MCBR-2025) held in Hyderabad from 11 to 14 December 2025.
Research work on Low-cost IoT-based Downtime Detection for UPS and Behaviour Analysis, carried out by Dr. Sachin Chaudhari along with his student Sannidhya Gupta, 5th-year Dual Degree student and Prakash Nayak, IT staff member, has been awarded the Best Paper Award at the 18th International Conference on Communication Systems & Networks (COMSNETS 2026) from 6 – 10 January 2026.
The Best Student Paper Award (First Place) was conferred for the work on Edge-Based Object Classification Using mmWave Radar on Qualcomm Innovators Development Kit by Sri Rama Rathan Reddy Koluguri, Akshat Puneet, and Dr. Abhishek Srivastava at ICEdge 2025 held at IISc Bengaluru from 18 to 20 December 2025.
Team Nexus (Mr. Likhith Kanigolla, Mr. Kartik Gharade, Mr. Peri Reddy Vaka, and Ms. Nishitha Varma) from IIIT Hyderabad has secured the ‘Best Promotion of oneM2M’ award (3rd Prize – 500,000 KRW) at the 2025 International oneM2M Hackathon – 8th Mobius Developer Challenge, for their project – oneM2M-Enabled AI for Resilient Building Systems.
The IAStructE – IIIT Hyderabad Student Chapter was awarded the Best Student Chapter Award at the ceremony held at Ph.D House, New Delhi, on 15 November. This recognition reflects the Chapter’s outstanding contributions to professional development, knowledge dissemination, and student engagement in the field of Structural and Earthquake Engineering.
At the 30th Annual Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025), held at Suzhou, China on 7 November 2025, a team of IIIT Hyderabad researchers received the Special Area Chair (SAC) highlights recognition for their research work on Aligning Text/Speech Representations from Multimodal Models with MEG Brain Activity During Listening.
Dr. Sachin Chaudhari’s students – Rahul Kumar, MS by Research in CSE and Ponnapureddy Srujan Reddy, MS by Research in ECE have been selected for the Chanakya PG Fellowship 2025. For the 2025 fellowship cycle, the TIH team proposed a focused problem statement in the agriculture domain – Image Processing for Crop Disease Identification.
Chedapangu Seema, M.Tech student at the Earthquake Engineering Research Centre (EERC) received high appreciation from the expert panel for her research work on AI-Driven Automated Screening for Seismic Vulnerabilities in Buildings at the Seismic Academy Annual Conference 2025, held in New Delhi, and organized by HILTI India.
Sahithi Kukkala, MS student, supervised by Dr. Ravi Kiran Sarvadevabhatla and co-supervised by Dr. Mitesh Khapra, IIT Madras – AI4Bhāra and Oikantik Nath, Ph.D scholar, IIT Madras received the Best Student Paper Runner-Up Award at ICDAR 2025 for their research on IndicDLP: A Foundational Dataset for Multi-Lingual and Multi-Domain Document Layout Parsing. ICDAR, the flagship document understanding conference, was held in Wuhan, Hubei, China, from 16 – 21 September.
Rohan Kumar, B.Tech, alumni and Jyothi Swaroopa Jinka, MS student supervised by Dr. Ravi Kiran Sarvadevabhatla received the Best Student Paper Award at ICDAR 2025 for their research on TexTAR – Textual Attribute Recognition in Multi-domain and Multi-lingual Document Images. ICDAR, the flagship document understanding conference, was held in Wuhan, Hubei, China, from 16 – 21 September 2025.
Dr. Rama Chandra Pillutla, a key member of the project team for Cattle Health Monitoring Intelligence titled Aarogya Vaidya Rekha (AVR), played an important role in its successful launch on 15 September 2025 in Pedapalli district, Telangana. Dr. Pillutla was conferred with the Leader of Change Award by the District Collector of Peddapalli, Sri K. Sriharsha, IAS for his guidance and valuable contributions to the project.
Dr. Rama Chandra Pillutla was nominated as a member of the Board of Studies, Andhra Mahila Sabhā Arts & Science College, Hyderabad. In this role Dr. Pillutla proposed and designed the syllabus for an Environmental Informatics course for UG Computer Science Honours students and actively conducted the classes.
IIIT Hyderabad has shown a significant improvement in this year’s NIRF rankings. Among the top universities in India (both government and private), IIITH was ranked 55 (74 last year). In the list of top engineering colleges in India, the institute secured the 38th position (47 last year) and was placed 89th in the overall category.
Dr. Vinoo Alluri and her students Lalit Mohan and Azhagammal S C were awarded Runner-up award for their work on Sensitivity to external demands drives maladaptive music use at the 18th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC-2025) held in Sao Paulo, Brazil from 21 – 25 July 2025.
Research work done on identifying methodological biases in a widely used large language model (LLM)-based metric for evaluating narrative flow (Sap et al., 2022, PNAS) by Amal Sunny, a CSD dual-degree student working under the supervision of Dr. Vishnu Sreekumar was awarded the Best Paper Award at the 29th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2025), co-located with ACL 2025 in Vienna, Austria.
Dr. P Pravin Kumar Venkat Rao was selected for the prestigious Centre for Engineering Education & Excellence (CEEE) programme – an initiative sponsored by the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) in collaboration with the Infosys Foundation and AICTE, focusing on enhancing teaching excellence in the domain of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Gunank Singh Jakhar, a Ph.D student working with Gowtham Raghunath Kurri and co-supervised by Suryajith Chillara has been selected as a finalist for the Jack Keil Wolf award for his research work on Fractional Subadditivity of Submodular Functions: Equality Conditions and Their Applications at the International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2025 held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA from 22 to 27 June 2025.
Research work done on Pseudo-labelling meets Label Smoothing for Noisy Partial Label Learning by Dr. Naresh Manwani, Dr. Vineet Gandhi and their student Darshana Saravanan was awarded Best Paper award at the 12th Workshop on Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC), CVPR 2025 at Nashville, Tennessee on 11 June 2025.
Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru and his student Tejasvi Chebrolu, and Ashwin Rajadesingan, University of Texas at Austin received the Best Paper Award — Honorable Mention for their research work on How Personal Narratives Empower Politically Disinclined Individuals to Engage in Political Discussions at the 17th ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci-2025) held at New Brunswick USA in May 2025
Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru and his students Arvindh Arun, Karuna K Chandra, Akshit Sinha, Balakumar Velayutham, Jashn Arora and Manish Jain from Google DeepMind, Bangalore received best paper award for their research work on Topo Goes Political: TDA-Based Controversy Detection in Imbalanced Reddit Political Data at BeyondFacts – 5nd International Workshop on Knowledge Graphs for Online Discourse Analysis (KnOD 2025), collocated with The Web Conference 2025 held at Sydney, Australia in May 2025
A team from Computer Systems Group comprising Anush Anand, B.Tech Honors; Pranav Agrawal, B.Tech Honors; and Dr. Tejas Bodas won the dynamic pricing competition 2024. The team leveraged their expertise in Gaussian Processes and Bayesian Optimization to optimize pricing strategies for a duopoly, with Gaussian Processes likely playing a key role in their success in the 2024 competition.
Smart City Living Lab team-NEXUS consisting of Mr. Likhith Kanigolla, Mr. Varada Sasidhar, Mr. Surya Suhaas, Mr. Himanshu Fanibhare won the Best Promotion of oneM2M award at the 4th International oneM2M Hackathon, held from 7 October to 13 December for their innovative project – oneM2M: Enabling Water Network Twins.
Aishani Pandey, (B.Tech + MS in CSE) working with Dr. Aniket Alam was awarded the Young Authors Recognition Award for her poster presentation on UnSight: Bridging the Educational Gap for Blind Learners at the 15th ITU Kaleidoscope Academic Conference 2024 held at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi from 21 to 23 October. The other authors of this paper are Arush Sachdeva, (B.Tech-3rd year-LCD working with Dr. Anirban Dasgupta) and Vivek Mathur, ( 5th year-CND working with Dr. Chittaranjan Hens).
Research work on Citation Anchor Text for Improving Precedent Retrieval: An Experimental Study on Indian Legal Documents by Gaurang Patil, Bhoomeendra Singh Sisodiya, K V K Santhy working with Prof. P Krishna Reddy was awarded Best Paper Award at the 37th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX-2024) from 11 to 13 December held at Brno, Czech Republic.
Research work on Application of SWMM for Urban Storm Water Management- A Case Study of Hyderabad City by Dr. Shaik Rehana and her Ph.D student Satish Kumar Mummidivarapu was awarded the best paper award at the 3rd International Conference on Advancements in Engineering Education (iCAEED-2024), held in Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia, from 20 – 23 November.
Rishabh Bhattacharya, a 3rd Year DD Student working Dr. Naresh Manwani won the First Prize in Naval Hackathon 2024, held virtually in October. The theme of his project was Navigation and real-time tracking of flying objects. He received the prize from the Defence Minister of India, Shri Rajnath Singh Ji.
Dr. Shubham Singhal received Best Paper Presentation Award for his research work on Study of Slope Stability Analysis of Hill Slopes with Retaining Walls at the 5th International Conference on Trends & Recent Advances in Civil Engineering (TRACE-2024) held on 15 and 16 October at Amity University, Noida. The other authors of this paper are Ravindra Kumar Tomar, Amity University and Ashish Tamang, 3Powergrid Corporation of India Limited, Mangan.
eSagu system, an IT-based agro-advisory system, developed by IT for Agricultural Research Center, has been mentioned in the report – Of Pioneers and Potentials – Transformation of the Public Sector with GenAI joint initiative by Technical University of Munich (TUM) think tank and Accenture. This is a report on Gen AI in the Public Sector across the globe.
The institute launched the first version of the My IIIT mobile app developed by a team of students on 23 October. The app is designed to offer a user-friendly interface, providing seamless access to key institute resources, particularly the IMS system, without requiring a VPN for students, faculty, and staff. Notably, it also introduces the first digital version of the institute’s faculty and staff contact directory – IIIT Soochika.
Smart City Living Lab from IIIT Hyderabad has been awarded the Best Education Institute Exhibit of the year at the eighth edition of India Mobile Congress held at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, in concurrence with WTSA’24, the governing conference of the ITU Standardization Sector (ITU-T) from 15 – 18 October 2024.
Team India wins at the International Linguistics Olympiad 2024. Competing against 206 participants drawn from 51 teams across 38 countries, the Indian contestants shone at the 21st International Linguistic Olympiad (IOL) held in Brasília, Brazil, from July 23 to July 31, 2024. The Indian team demonstrated their prowess in the individual categories with Animikha Dutta Dhar bagging a silver medal, Shrilakshmi Venkatraman and Faraz Ahmed Siddiqui winning a bronze medal each and Ananya Agarwal receiving an Honourable Mention.
