The recently released Global AI Vibrancy Ranking has ranked India as the top spot-holder in the gender inclusion parameters, proving the indispensable role that women play in the AI ecosystem of this country. This Women's Day, INDIAai applauds all the women who are constantly raising the bar for all else to follow suit. Here is a list of powerful and talented women who are making their mark in the academic research areas of AI.

• Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay works at the Machine Intelligence Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute, where she joined after completing her PhD from the same institute. She was the director of the institute from 2015 to 2020 and has won several awards including the Bhatnagar Prize, Infosys award, TWAS Prize, DBT National Women Bioscientist Award (Young), among others. She is currently a member of the Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council of the Prime Minister of India (PM-STIAC). Alongside, Dr Bandyopadhyay has also authored more than 300 research papers and edited six books. Her research interests include pattern recognition using machine learning, bioinformatics, data mining, soft and evolutionary computation.
• Sunita Sarawagi is the Professor In Charge of Center of Machine Intelligence and Data Science at IIT Bombay. She has received her PhD from UC Berkley and has four patents to her name. Her current research interests include sequence models for text and time-series, domain adaptation, effective human intervention in learning, among others. She was awarded the Infosys Prize in 2019 for Engineering and Computer Science, and the distinguished Alumnus award from IIT Kharagpur. She has several publications including best paper awards at ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDM, NIPS, and ICML conferences.  She has served on the board of directors of the ACM SIGKDD and VLDB foundation. She was program chair for the ACM SIGKDD 2008 conference, research track co-chair for the VLDB 2011 conference and has served as program committee member for SIGMOD, VLDB, SIGKDD, ICDE, and ICML conferences, and on the editorial boards of the ACM TODS and ACM TKDD journals. She has also worked at Google Research, CMU, and IBM Almaden Research Center.
• Rajeswari Sridhar is the head of department of Computer Science and Engineering at National Institute of Technology, Trichy. Her areas of interest include Data Structures and Algorithms, Compilers, Machine learning and Deep learning, Artificial Intelligence, Natural language Processing, Data Science and Analytics, and Cloud Computing. She won the Best Paper award at the 12th Tamil Internet Conference – INFITT 2013 for the paper titled, “Use of Grammar Rules for post processing of Tamil OCRed document”. She has numerous publications to her credit in national and international journals and conferences. 
• Arpita Patra is an Associate Professor at Dept. of Computer Science & Automation (CSA), EECS Division, Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, where she is also part of the Cryptography and Information Security (CrIS) Lab. Her specialisation is on cryptography, a key enabling technology for cybersecurity. She is also associated with the Theoretical Computer Science Group at CSA, Security Group at EECS, AI @ IISc at IISc and Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber-Physical Systems at IISc. She has numerous accolades to her name, such as Google India AI/ML Research Award 2020, NASI Young Scientist Platinum Jubilee Award (2018), SERB Women Excellence Award 2017, to name a few. 
• Poonam Goyal is Associate Professor in the department of Computer Science & Information Systems, Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani. She heads the Web Intelligence and Social Computing (WiSOC) Lab of the department and is a core member of Advanced Data Analytics and Parallel Technologies (ADAPT) Laboratory. She specialises in the areas of Big Data Analytics, High Performance Computing, Multimedia Retrieval, Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. Her research has contributed in various social and scientific domains like social media analytics, multi-modal knowledge graphs, bio-informatics, etc. She has published several research articles in various top tier conferences and journals such as IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications, IEEE Transactions on Social Computing, Journal of Data Science and Applications, IEEE Cluster, IEEE Big Data, IEEE HiPC, IEEE/ACM/ASA DSAA, ACM ICMR, etc. She has also filed a few patents related to knowledge graphs. She is a co-recipient of 2010 IBM Research Innovation Award under the Smarter Planet Initiative in the area of Scalable Data Analytics.
• Richa Singh is a Professor at IIT-Jodhpur, India, and an Adjunct Professor with IIIT-Delhi and West Virginia University, USA, where she also received her Ph.D. degree in computer science in 2008. Her areas of interest are pattern recognition, machine learning, and biometrics. She has co-edited the book Deep Learning in Biometrics and has delivered tutorials on deep learning and domain adaptation in ICCV 2017, AFGR 2017, and IJCNN 2017. She is a fellow of IAPR and a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM. She was the recipient of the Kusum and Mohandas Pai Faculty Research Fellowship at IIIT-Delhi, the FAST Award by the Department of Science and Technology, India, and several best paper and best poster awards in international conferences. She has also served as the Program Co-Chair of AFGR2019 and BTAS 2016, and a General Co-Chair of ISBA 2017. Currently, she is serving as a Program Co-Chair of IJCB 2020. She’s also the Vice President (Publications) of the IEEE Biometrics Council and an Associate Editor-in-Chief of Pattern Recognition, and Area/Associate Editor of several journals.
• Sriparna Saha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna. Besides being the author of a book published by Springer-Verlag, she authored or co-authored more than 260 papers. Her current research interests include deep learning, natural language processing, machine learning, information extraction, text mining, bioinformatics and multiobjective optimisation. A senior member of IEEE, she is the recipient of the Lt Rashi Roy Memorial Gold Medal from the Indian Statistical Institute for outstanding performance in MTech (computer science). She is the recipient of the Google India Women in Engineering Award, 2008, NASI Young Scientist Platinum Jubilee Award 2016, BIRD Award 2016, IEI Young Engineers' Award 2016, SERB WOMEN IN EXCELLENCE AWARD 2018 and SERB Early Career Research Award 2018. She is the recipient of DUO-India fellowship 2020, Humboldt Research Fellowship, Indo-U.S. Fellowship for Women in STEMM (WISTEMM) Women Overseas Fellowship program 2018 and CNRS fellowship. She won the best paper awards in CLINICAL-NLP workshop of COLING 2016, IEEE-INDICON 2015, International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI 2012). In a 2020 survey conducted by Stanford University, her name has is included in the list of top 2% of scientists of their main subfield discipline (Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing), across those that have published at least five papers.
• Rijurekha Sen is the Pankaj Gupta Young Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. During her research, she has built systems for road traffic monitoring, human mobility measurements, public policy audit and privacy enhancement in ubiquitous systems, among others. She has received the Google India AI/ML Research Award 2018, ACM India Doctoral Dissertation Award 2014, Max Planck India Mobility Grant (2020-2023), Imprint-II Research Grant (2019-2021), among many more grants, awards and fellowships.

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Image by Markéta Machová from Pixabay