Ranjita Bhagwan Chosen as Winner of ACM India Outstanding Contributions in Computing by a Woman (OCCW) 2020 Award

November 4, 2020

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) India Council has named Dr. Ranjita Bhagwan as the recipient of the 2020 ACM India Outstanding Contributions in Computing by a Woman (OCCW) Award. A selection committee comprising eminent international personalities chose Ranjita for this inaugural edition of the award.

The ACM India OCCW Award recognizes women professionals who have made fundamental, innovative and impactful contributions to computing field primarily working in India. The award carries a prize of ₹7 lakhs. Financial support for this award is provided by Google.

Ranjita is recognized for "her contributions to design of networking and distributed systems, particularly using data and machine learning to improve system design, mentoring young researchers, and being an inspiration to women in research and technology."

Ranjita has helped put Computer Systems research in India on the global map, especially with regard to Machine Learning for Computer Systems Engineering. She has served both the academic and industrial communities by providing thought leadership, organizing conferences, and mentoring young researchers including women engineers.

Her body of work has focused on a variety of problems related to developing large scale secure networking and distributed systems. She has been working on applying data-driven approaches to make these systems more robust and predictable for over 15 years. Recently, she observed that new opportunities for the use of machine-learning have emerged because of the advent of cloud-hosted software and services. She has effectively utilized machine-learning based techniques to analyze huge amounts of data generated by Cloud services to improve their performance, reliability and security.

Ranjita is currently a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India. Her academic credentials include BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur followed by MS and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of California, San Diego.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Ranjita Bhagwan.

Regards,
The ACM India Awards Steering Committee