The Vachani School of Advanced Computing (VSAC) at Ashoka University is constantly working on several research problems across diverse areas, with a special focus on interdisciplinary research. The programme provides PhD students with the required infrastructure to explore and work on emerging, cutting-edge research problems (both disciplinary/core problems and interdisciplinary CS + X problems)

The following are some of the research threads ongoing at the different research centres at Ashoka University:

Data Science (DS)

1. DS and Nutrition: Building food, recipe, ingredient, and process-based knowledge graphs for the Indian population, and relating nutritional intake with health outcomes.
2. DS and Media: Misinformation analysis in social media network communities; analysis of 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 historical terms and concepts.
4. Natural Language Processing: Causality in NLP, legal text processing, and biomedical text mining
5. Epidemiological and weather modelling

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 digitised health data in India.

Digitalisation, 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.
3. Elections and digitalisation: Recoverability from failures when elections fail to verify.

Algorithms

1. Developing an alternative metric to worst-case complexity as a function of input size, capturing problem-specific characteristics and parameterising performance in these terms.
2. Exploring connections between spectral methods and direct combinatorial techniques for solving graph problems.
3. Defining useful algorithmic models for computational problems, driving research in fields such as Economics, Biology, and Physics.

Cryptography

1. Accountable end-to-end encryption, exploring trade-offs between handling abuse and user anonymity and privacy.
2. Randomness beacons: Work based on verifiable delay functions (proof of time) to produce verifiable randomness at predetermined intervals.
3. Oblivious stable matching: Using arithmetic circuits to enable stable matching without a trusted server.
4. Lattice-based post-quantum Cryptography
5. Applied Cryptography
6. Blockchain 
7. Network Security

Formal Methods and Automated Reasoning

1. Integrating logic with AI to automate proofs and scale synthesis and verification of real-world infrastructures.
2. Trustworthy computing in domains such as autonomous systems, cryptography, and distributed protocols.
3. Modern advances in program synthesis, model checking, and AI-assisted reasoning for next-generation computing reliability.

Bio-AI and Image Informatics

1. Image decomposition and denoising to minimise the need for ground-truth labels in microscopy, demonstrating utility through segmentation, tracking, and other quantitative downstream tasks.
2. Virtual staining, an emergent image translation task with significant implications for the medical domain.
3. Structural bioinformatics, exploring the ‘AlphaFold family’ of architectures to model protein sequence-to-structure relationships and use it to solve downstream tasks such as protein stability prediction.

Other Research Areas: Computer Vision, Graphics,  Physical AI, AR-VR, Cognitive Computing

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

For more information about faculty, click here

Following are the steps for the admission process:

1. Candidates apply 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 above 700 in CS or allied areas may be scheduled to directly appear for the interview.
3. Candidates who clear the written test or have a GATE score above 700 are called for an interview. Both the written test and interview are conducted offline at the Ashoka University campus.
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

1. Application deadline for August admissions: 30 April 2026 (extended from 1 April)
2. Written Admission Test: 18–19 May 2025 (tentative)
3. PhD Interviews: 18–19 May 2025 (tentative)
4. Final decision and issue of offers: 15 July 2025 (tentative)
5. Admission to PhD: August 2026

Applications submitted after the application deadline will be considered for the next admission cycle.

The written test will be conducted in an offline mode at the Ashoka campus.

Guidelines and Syllabus

Please find sample questions for practice below:

https://www.ashoka.edu.in/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/sample1.pdf

https://www.ashoka.edu.in/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/sample2.pdf

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 understanding of the area of research (CS and related areas), communication skills, and commitment to pursue a PhD.

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

Regular PhD in CS

• Post admission (till the candidate clears the coursework): INR 20,000

• JRF (after clearing coursework): INR 50,000 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

• No fees for the first two years; INR 12,500 per semester thereafter

Accommodation

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

SRF: Enhanced PhD stipend of ₹70,000/₹80,000 per month + HRA in the third and fourth year for exceptional candidates.