Computer Science research at Ashoka engages with disciplinary research questions in the areas of Algorithms and Theoretical Computer Science, Distributed Computing, Systems and Architecture, Programming Languages, Networks, Cryptography, Security, and, of course, AI and Machine Learning.
In addition, in recent years India has seen digitisation in public life at an unprecendented scale – including the nation-wide digital identity Aadhaar, the National Digital Health Mission, digital payments using the Unified Payment Interface, electronic voting, credit and tax registries, the national AI for Social Good initiative etc. – which provide unique opportunities and challenges for novel research questions in the interplay of computer science and society. Moreover, the Privacy Judgment of 2017 has brought informational privacy to the forefront in India and has raised new multidisciplinary research questions in ethics of digitisation and privacy and security that have hitherto not been addressed. CS at Ashoka is uniquely positioned in a liberal arts environment to research some of these questions.
Computer Science at Ashoka is also collaborating with other departments and centres in the social, economic, political, ecological, environmental and natural sciences to develop a one-of-its-kind datacentre – a repository of curated and indexed data and data analytics techniques – that can support data science and machine leaning research not only at Ashoka but also at other places. One of the major focus areas of such data-driven research will be health, with dimensions in nutrition, agriculture, sutainability and epidemiology.
Traditionally, in India, CS has been a part of engineering schools which tend to emphasize general engineering knowledge such as mechanics, electrical systems, manufacturing processes, chemistry, etc.
At Ashoka, our general curriculum has a much broader emphasis as reflected in the foundation courses and writing requirements.
The curriculum for the CS major is similar to what is being taught in, say, the IITs; taken together with CS electives, we fully expect that our students will be ready to take on graduate studies in any of the top universities in the world, if they would like to.
Courses typically have a project component to them and enough hands-on experience is provided to the students.
CS today is no longer just a technical discipline. We believe that the education needed to thrive and lead in areas such as social networks, mobile phones, e-commerce, e-governance, cyber-warfare, etc. goes well beyond what is covered by engineering alone.
Examples like Facebook and Twitter show us the power of combining tech with insight into the human world. We’d like to enable our students to have similarly impactful ideas.