The Inter-Research-Institute Student Seminar in Computer Science (IRISS) is an annual student seminar conducted by ACM India, and is also co-located with the ACM India Annual Event. The IRISS 2020, organized at IIT Gandhinagar, attracted many eminent researchers from both academia and industry along with many fellow research students. What sets apart IRISS for me from most of the other conferences is the diversity in the backgrounds of the attendees, ranging from core CS theory to various disciplines of computer systems and artificial intelligence, and also the variety of carefully designed sessions that I will allude to next.

IRISS 2020 had several sessions covering the various areas of computer science. The two keynotes included one in the area of Privacy Amplification and the other in the area of Testing SQL queries. A special attraction was the talks given by the recipients of the ACM India Doctoral Dissertation Award and the Honorable Mention. These talks were exceptionally well structured to cover the overview of the PhD thesis. Another particularly refreshing session included the talks by Early Career Researchers. These included young leaders in diverse fields of industry, academics and start-up. They discussed their experiences as a graduate student, what drove their career choices and their life after graduation. For the crowd that included many graduate students like me, getting to understand the flavour and challenges of research that usually come on our way as we graduate and join the research community was very enlightening. The panel discussions were also on some extremely relevant topics including pedagogy in computer science, and industry awareness in terms of the opportunities and challenges. What appealed a lot to me was an “ask me anything” session where the prominent researchers who were part of the IRISS event and the speakers from the ACM India Annual day that followed the next day were present. This informal session was extremely inspiring and informative.

The various contributed talks, lightning talks and poster presentations provide students with a platform for showcasing recent research work. These include many presentations on papers accepted in top-tier international conferences. I also got an opportunity to present my work on DBMS testing as part of the contributed talks at IRISS 2019, which was held in Kochi. The feedback from the peers and experienced researchers was extremely useful.

The event included lunches, dinner and cultural show. These also provided a great networking opportunity with researchers from various universities in the country. Being co-located with ACM Annual Event, I also got a chance to listen to some eminent researchers, including Yann Lecun (2018 ACM Turing Award Winner), Shwetak Patel (Winner of 2018 ACM Prize in Computing), Susanne Albers (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize) and M. Balakrishnan (ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award) deliver really illuminating talks. I found the talk by M. Balakrishnan on "Assistive Technology Solutions for Mobility & Education of Visually Impaired" particularly extremely motivating and informative.

Lastly, the event venue being IIT Gandhinagar, situated on the banks of Sabarmati River, provided aesthetic surroundings. The facilities and hospitality at IIT Gandhinagar were amazing and I had a wonderful time during my stay there.