Communications of the ACM
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Credit: Spooky Pooka / Debut Art
Computational sciences in the India region are going through an exciting time. While India has always had significant strength in theoretical computer science (CS), in recent years it has developed substantial presence and maturity in other, more applied areas of CS such as hardware and computer architecture, data science and artificial intelligence (AI), and cyber-security. Alongside pure research, there has been a significant push toward lab-to-field projects and technology transfer and deployment, creating broad impact to the region and beyond. Significant efforts have been made on the democratization of education through online courses, enabling the vast population to learn from a relatively limited number of available experts. All these activities have continued to bolster India's already strong IT industry and been a factor in the huge increase in the number of startups (under 1,000 in 2016 to over 60,000 in 2022a), with the number of unicorn startups reaching 100.b
This second regional special section from India represents this diversity and excitement through 15 articles, which span horizontal cross-cutting developments focusing on innovations in specific verticals at different levels of maturity from pure research to real-world deployments. These articles are co-written by authors from 15 institutions in the Indian subcontinent, highlighting a strong academic ecosystem in the region.
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