The CS Department at Ashoka is constantly working on several interesting research problems spanning various areas, with a special focus on interdisciplinary research. We also provide PhD students with the required infrastructure to choose and work on newer, cutting edge research problems (both disciplinary/core problems and CS+X problems). Following are some of the research threads ongoing at the different research centers at Ashoka:

1. Data Science (DS)
   1. DS and Nutrition: Building food, recipe, ingredient, and process based knowledge graph for Indian population and relating nutritional intake with health outcomes
   2. DS and Media: Misinformation analysis in social media network communities, analysis of the social and political discourse in mass media and its evolution
   3. DS and Archaeology: Developing browsable ontologies from archaeology reports in India – establishing contextual relationships between various historical terms and concepts
   4. Natural Language Processing – causality in NLP, legal text processing, Bio-medical text mining 
   5. Epidemiological and Weather modeling
2. Digital Health
   1. Desired Future of Digital Health: Digital Twins 
   2. Computational radiology and pathology using deep learning models
   3. Systems Biomedicine and Machine Learning for Metabolic Diseases and Rare Genetic Disorders
   4. DS and Genomics for Pathogen Surveillance 
   5. Leveraging open source language models to unlock evidence from digitized health data in India
3. Digitalization, AI, and Society
   1. AI for public good: Using satellites and AI to measure health and material-living standards in India
   2. Privacy and Security in large public service applications: Security and vulnerabilities in Aadhaar; Privacy, fairness, and risks of Public Digital Health Systems
   3. Elections and Digitalization: Recoverability from failures when elections fail to verify
4. Algorithms:
   1. Developing an alternate metric to the worst-case complexity as a function of input size that captures some of the problem specifics and parametrizes the performance in these terms.
   2. Exploring connections between spectral methods and direct combinatorial techniques for solving graph problems.
   3. Defining useful algorithmic models for many of the computational problems that drive cutting-edge research in fields like Economics, Biology, and Physics.
5. Cryptography
6. 1. Accountable end-to-end encryption. Exploring tradeoffs between handling abuse vs user anonymity and privacy.
   2. Randomness beacons: Work based on verifiable delay functions (proof of time) to try and produce certain verifiable kinds of randomness at predetermined intervals.
   3. Oblivious stable matching: Using arithmetic circuits to enable stable matching without a trusted server.
   4. Interdisciplinary: Digitisation – examining the ideas behind, and deployments of, systems such as Aadhaar.
   5. Lattice-based Post-quantum Cryptography
   6. Applied Cryptography
   7. Blockchain 
   8. Network Security

The following table contains the details of our current team of faculty members.

Faculty	Designation	Research Area	Other Details
Dr. Manu Awasthi	Associate Professor	High performance and energy-efficient memory and storage systems	PhD, University of Utah
Dr. Subhashis Banerjee	Professor (HoD, CS)	Digitalisation and Society; Computer Vision	PhD, IISc Bangalore
Dr. Partha Pratim Das	Professor	Image Processing; Digital Geometry;Software Engineering	PhD, IIT Kharagpur
Dr. Lipika Dey	Professor	Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science	PhD, IIT Kharagpur
Dr. Debayan Gupta	Assistant Professor	Cryptography; Secure Multi-Party Computation; Privacy; Databases	PhD, Yale University
Dr. Mahavir Jhawar	Associate Professor	Cryptography; Network Security	PhD, ISI Kolkata
Dr. Sandeep Juneja	Professor	Applied probability; Sequential learning; Simulation theory; Computational finance; Games in queues	PhD, Stanford University
Dr. Rintu Kutum	Faculty Fellow	Augmented Intelligence; Genomics; Digital Health	PhD, CSIR-Institute of Genomics & Integrative Biology
Dr. Maya Ramanath	Professor (Visiting)	Database Systems; Information Retrieval	PhD, IISc Bangalore
Dr. Sandeep Sen	Professor	Algorithms and Complexity	PhD, Duke University
Dr. Raghavendra Singh	Professor (Visiting)	Computer Vision	PhD, University of Southern California
Dr. Anirban Sen	Assistant Professor	Computational Social Science; Social Network Analysis	PhD, IIT Delhi

For more information about faculty, click here

Following are the steps for the admission process:

1. Candidate applies for admission through the portal (https://apply.ashoka.edu.in/).
2. Shortlisted candidates are called for the written admission test – Candidates with a valid GATE score of above 700 in CS or allied areas may be scheduled to directly appear for the interview 
3. Candidates who clear the written test/with a GATE score above 700 are called for an interview (online or offline). 
4. Candidates clearing the interview are issued offer letters for admission to the PhD programme.

Note: If your GATE score is above 700 and you want an exemption from the written test, please send an email to phd.cs@ashoka.edu.in, along with a current resume and your valid GATE scorecard.

Applications can be submitted round the year. The processing deadlines for the current academic year (2025-26) are mentioned below.

Round 1

• Application deadline for August admissions : 15 April 2025 (Extended from April 1)
• Written Admission Test: 03-05 May 2025
• PhD Interviews: 03-05 May 2025
• Final Decision and Issue of Offers: 15 July 2025 (tentatively)
• Admission to PhD: 01 August 2025

Round 2

• Application deadline for February admissions: TBA
• Written Admission Test: TBA
• PhD Interviews: TBA
• Final Decision and Issue of Offers: TBA
• Admission to PhD: 3rd Week of January

Applications submitted after the application deadline will be considered for the next admission cycle. For example, applications submitted after the round 1 deadline will be considered for February admissions (round 2).

The entrance test will be conducted in an online mode. We will release the link to the test and other instructions soon.

Exam Guidelines and Syllabus

View

Please find sample questions for practice:

Sample 1  Sample 2

 

 

All candidates who qualify in the written test and/or have a valid GATE score above 700 will be called for an interview. A typical interview will be conducted by faculty members of the Computer Science and other relevant departments. The objective of the interview is to assess the candidate’s basic understanding of the area of research (CS and related areas), communication skills, and commitment to pursue Ph.D.

Selection will be based on merit taking a combination of factors into consideration solely at the discretion of the faculty members. These factors include, but are not limited to, the performance of the candidate in the written test (and/or GATE) and interview, overall academic record, and achievements such as scholarships, awards in competitions, paper publications and internship or work experience in prestigious organizations.

Regular PhD in CS

• JRF : INR 50000 plus INR 10,000 HRA per month for the first 2 years post admission:
• SRF (post passing the qualifying exam for PhD): INR 55,000 per month plus INR 10,000 HRA per month

Integrated PhD in CS

• Post admission (till the candidate clears the coursework): INR 20,000
• JRF (After clearing coursework) – INR 50000 plus INR 10,000 HRA per month
• SRF (post passing the qualifying exam for PhD): INR 55,000 per month plus INR 10,000 HRA per month
• Tuition fee: No fees for the first two years, INR 12,500 afterwards per semester

Accommodation: Ashoka University provides accommodation to PhD students in residential societies around the campus, subject to availability. Alternatively, students can arrange their own accommodations and avail an HRA of INR 10,000 per month.