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KIAC Winter School on AI for Fintech
KIAC Winter School on AI for Fintech
The KIAC Winter School on AI for Fintech brings together students, researchers, and industry professionals interested in the rapidly evolving landscape of technology-enabled finance. Through a series of lectures, hands-on tutorials, and project sessions, participants will gain exposure to key themes in cryptography for fintech, scalable financial systems, and mathematical finance.
Over the course of one week, the program will feature interactive sessions led by faculty experts from IISc and other leading institutions, fostering both technical learning and interdisciplinary dialogue.
Dates: January 21–27, 2026
Venue: Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
Organised by: Kotak IISc AI-ML Centre (KIAC)
Themes and Topics
Themes and Topics
The Winter School will focus on three broad themes:
- Crypto for Fintech
Covers cryptographic foundations—encryption, signatures, hash functions, and hardness assumptions—and introduces applications through secure multi-party computation, blockchain, and zero-knowledge proofs.
- Scalable Financial Analytics
Focuses on AI-driven and data-intensive approaches for financial systems, including scalable architectures, real-time analytics, and graph neural networks for transaction networks.
- Mathematical Finance
Introduces fundamental and computational aspects of financial modelling, including option pricing in discrete and continuous time, simulation-based methods, and optimal portfolio selection.
Program Schedule
Program Schedule
Tentative structure (detailed schedule will be updated soon)
Day 1 – Jan 21 (Wed) Inauguration & Crypto for Fintech I
Day 1 – Jan 21 (Wed) Inauguration & Crypto for Fintech I
Opening remarks, crypto foundations
Day 2 – Jan 22 (Thu) Crypto for Fintech II
Day 2 – Jan 22 (Thu) Crypto for Fintech II
Secure multi-party computations, blockchain
Day 3 – Jan 23 (Fri) Scalable Financial Analytics – I
Day 3 – Jan 23 (Fri) Scalable Financial Analytics – I
Scalable systems for fintech
Day 4 – Jan 24 (Sat) Scalable Financial Analytics – II
Day 4 – Jan 24 (Sat) Scalable Financial Analytics – II
Graph neural networks, fraud detection
Day 5 – Jan 25 (Sun) Day Off
Day 5 – Jan 25 (Sun) Day Off
Day 6 – Jan 26 (Mon) Mathematical Finance
Day 6 – Jan 26 (Mon) Mathematical Finance
Modern option pricing and hedging frameworks
Day 7 – Jan 27 (Tue) Concluding Session
Day 7 – Jan 27 (Tue) Concluding Session
Keynote from Industry experts, participant presentations, and closing remarks
Registration
Registration
Who Can Apply
Who Can Apply
PhD students, researchers, and advanced Master’s students
Professionals from the financial technology and data analytics sectors
Faculty members and educators interested in AI applications in finance
Registration Details
Registration Details
Last Date for Registration: December 15, 2025
Notification of Acceptance: December 20, 2025
Registration Fee: [Upon being shortlisted ₹ 2000 for students, ₹ 5000 for professionals]
Accommodation and Logistics
Accommodation and Logistics
Limited accommodation will be available on the IISc campus for outstation participants (on a first-come basis).
Participants are expected to make their own travel arrangements.
Please register here: Register Now
Organiser: Kotak IISc AI ML Centre (KIAC)
Organiser: Kotak IISc AI ML Centre (KIAC)
The Kotak IISc AI ML Centre is a joint initiative between Kotak Mahindra Bank and the Indian Institute of Science. The Centre fosters interdisciplinary research and education in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, with applications to finance, sustainability, and social impact. The school will be conducted by the following faculty members from IISc. Each faculty member, along with industry experts and research scholars, will deliver lectures and guide interactive sessions aligned with their area of expertise.
Organising team
Organising team
The school will be conducted by the following faculty members from IISc. Each faculty member, along with industry experts and research scholars, will deliver lectures and guide interactive sessions aligned with their area of expertise.
Prof Arpita Patra
Prof Arpita Patra
Computer Science and Automation, IISc
Prof. Arpita Patra is a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science and Automation at IISc. Her research focuses on cryptography, particularly on the theoretical and practical aspects of secure multiparty computation protocols. She received her Ph.D. from IIT Madras and has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Bristol (UK), ETH Zurich (Switzerland), and Aarhus University (Denmark).
Her work has been recognized through several honors, including the NASI Young Scientist Platinum Jubilee Award, SERB Women Excellence Award, and INAE Young Engineer Award, along with associateships at IAS, INAE, and TWAS. She has served as a Council Member of IARCS since 2017.
Prof Bhavana Kanukurthi
Prof Bhavana Kanukurthi
Computer Science and Automation, IISc
Professor Bhavana Kanukurthi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Automation at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). Her research focuses on cryptography, with a specific interest in areas like the security of digital systems. She received her PhD from Boston University and conducted her postdoctoral research at the University of California, Los Angeles, before joining IISc in 2014.
Dr Chaya Ganesh
Dr Chaya Ganesh
Computer Science and Automation, IISc
Dr Chaya Ganesh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Automation at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). Her research focuses on cryptography and security, including fundamental and applied cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, and machine learning security. She received her Ph.D. from New York University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Aarhus University before joining IISc in 2019.
Dr Gugan Thoppe
Dr Gugan Thoppe
Computer Science and Automation, IISc
Gugan Thoppe is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Automation department at the Indian Institute of Science since 2019. He is also an Associate Researcher at the Robert Bosch Centre, IIT Madras. He received his Ph.D. in 2016 from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai. Following this, he completed postdoctoral research at two places: Technion Institute of Technology, Israel (2015-17) and Duke University, USA (2017-19).
Dr Punit Rathore
Dr Punit Rathore
Cyber-Physical Systems, IISc
Dr. Punit Rathore is an Assistant Professor at IISc Bengaluru, jointly affiliated with the Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber-Physical Systems (RBCCPS) and the Centre for Infrastructure, Sustainable Transportation, and Urban Planning (CiSTUP), where he leads the VISTA Lab. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Senseable City Lab, MIT (USA) and the Grab-NUS AI Lab, National University of Singapore. His research interests include big data analytics, unsupervised and explainable AI, spatio-temporal data mining, and machine learning for autonomous systems and transportation. He also explores AI applications in healthcare, agriculture, infrastructure, and robotics.
Prof Shashi Jain
Prof Shashi Jain
Management Studies, IISc
Dr. Shashi Jain is an Associate Professor in the Department of Management Studies at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). His research focuses on quantitative and computational finance, particularly in option pricing theory, derivative risk management, and the use of data-driven and neural network-based methods for hedging.
Prof Srikanth Iyer
Prof Srikanth Iyer
Mathematics, IISc
Prof Srikanth Iyer received his M.Sc. integrated degree in Statistics from IIT-Kanpur in 1990 and his PhD from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1994. He had a year and half stint as a post-doc at the Technion and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He joined the faculty of IIT-Kanpur in 1996 and subsequently moved to IISc in 2004. His research interests include stochastic geometry, mathematical finance, and branching processes.
Prof Sundeep Prabhakar Chepuri
Prof Sundeep Prabhakar Chepuri
Electrical and Communication Engineering, IISc
Prof. Sundeep Prabhakar Chepuri is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering at IISc Bengaluru. He received his M.Sc. (cum laude) and Ph.D. (cum laude) degrees in Electrical Engineering from TU Delft, Netherlands. His research interests span mathematical signal processing, statistical inference, and machine learning, with applications in communications, network sciences, and computational imaging.
His recent work focuses on graph signal processing, sparse sampling, and AI/ML methods for wireless communications. He serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks and the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, and is an elected member of multiple IEEE technical committees.
Prof Yogesh Simmhan
Prof Yogesh Simmhan
Computational and Data Sciences, IISc
Prof. Yogesh Simmhan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computational and Data Sciences at IISc Bengaluru. His research focuses on distributed and scalable data platforms, cloud and edge computing, and machine learning for big data and IoT applications.
He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University, Bloomington, and leads the DREAM:Lab at IISc. He is a recipient of the Swarna Jayanti Fellowship (2019) and the IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing (2020).
Contact Us: For any queries, please contact us at office.kiac@iisc.ac.in. Kindly include “KIAC Winter School” in the subject line of your email.
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