Prof. Smruti Ranjan Sarangi Selected for ACM India Outstanding Contribution to Computing Education (OCCE) 2022 Award

October 12, 2022

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) India Council has named Prof. Smruti Ranjan Sarangi of Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi as the recipient of ACM India Outstanding Contribution to Computing Education (OCCE) Award for 2022. A selection committee comprising eminent international personalities chose him for this edition of the OCCE award.

The ACM India OCCE Award recognizes individuals who have made fundamental, innovative and impactful contributions to computing education in India. The award carries a prize of ₹7 lakhs. Financial support for this award is provided by Microsoft Research India.

Smruti is being awarded “for extensive contributions to the computer architecture community in terms of writing textbooks, remote teaching, and development of educational software.”

He has significantly invested himself in multiple activities related to computing education with a wide and lasting impact. His extensive contributions can be categorized into the following broad areas: textbook writing, development of educational software such as emulators and simulators, creating national level curricula and new courses at IIT Delhi, research in computing education, and teaching outreach (locally and internationally). He has consistently received outstanding reviews for over a decade in his teaching evaluations at IIT Delhi and has been the recipient of multiple teaching excellence and faculty awards.

Smruti is an ardent proponent of the open-source textbook movement. His textbooks in the field of computer architecture are regarded highly and are freely readable online, supplemented by slides and videos on YouTube. They are prescribed in a large number of colleges in India as well as internationally and have been downloaded in 77 countries. The architecture simulator stack created by his group has been used in multiple countries for over a decade. Apart from developing and introducing new courses in his institution, he has contributed significantly to research in computing education, including the study and quantification of the impact of remote education. He has developed multiple MOOCs, conducted for universities within and outside India and for industry participants. Apart from graduating multiple MTech and PhD students, he has coached school children for the International Olympiad for Informatics for many years.

Smruti is Usha Hasteer Chair Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at IIT Delhi. He holds a joint appointment with the Department of Electrical Engineering and is associated with the School of Information Technology and the Bharti School of Telecommunication. His teaching and research interests are in computer architecture, operating systems, and parallel and distributed systems. He obtained his BTech from IIT Kharagpur, and MS and PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

Please join us in congratulating Prof. Sarangi.

Regards,
The ACM India Awards Steering Committee