Uplink Internship Program 2025

Objectives

Building on the enthusiasm from both mentors and interns for the past UPLINK editions, we are launching UPLINK 2025 on Feb 03. Note that the application deadline has been advanced to Feb 22 instead of Mar 01 as in the last edition.

Notable features of UPLINK 2025

  • IKDD will provide a stipend of 50000 INR in total for the 3 months on successful completion of the internship.
  • For in-campus internships, the faculty mentor will assist the student for accommodation. IKDD will reimburse a maximum of 5,000 INR for travel between the student’s hometown and the internship location upon presentation of receipts.
  • The student will be recognized with an ‘ACM IKDD Uplink Intern’ badge on successful completion of the internship.
  • If the internship works results in a paper acceptance at a relevant CORE-A* conference, IKDD will support the conference registration and travel for one of the authors of the paper. If the paper gets published in a CORE-A conference, IKDD will support the conference registration for one of the authors. This support is capped at 2.0 Lakhs INR per faculty mentor.
  • We plan to support about 14 students in the 2025 edition.

Student Eligibility

  • The student must be enrolled full-time in a bachelors or masters program in a degree granting institute in India.
  • A bachelors candidate must be studying in the 3rd year of the program and a masters candidate must be studying in the 1st year of the program at the time of application deadline on Feb 22, 2025.
  • There are no restrictions on the department or specialization area of the student as long as they meet other eligibility criteria.
  • The student must get a no-objection letter from the institute for enrolling in this internship. While the letter will be sought only if a student gets selected for the internship, we strongly recommend checking feasibility of the same prior to application.
  • The student should ideally have a strong background in fundamental subjects such as probability, statistics, linear algebra, excellent coding skills, and completed courses in machine learning / deep learning. Prior experience of executing projects related to data science is ideal.

Faculty Mentors

The following faculty members from top institutes across India have graciously agreed to be mentors for the 2025 edition.

Uplink Interns 2025

This year the response for Uplink was overwhelming. We received more than 600 students from close to 350 different institutions across India. There were many excellent applications. Unfortunately we were able to select only 16› of these as the Uplink interns for 2025. Congratulations to the selected candidates.

Intern Mentor Topic

Abhay Bhandarkar
(Ramaiah Institute of Technology)
Vineeth N Balasubramanian
(IIT Hyderabad)		 Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Ritwik Ghosh
(IIT Madras)
Gautam Shroff
(IIIT Delhi)		 Meta-learning for Financial Markets

Om Vishesh
(Central University of Jharkhand)
Harshad Khadilkar
(IIT Bombay)		 Agentic workflow to maintain the IKDD premier papers website

Dhruv Jindal
(University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun)
Kaustubh Beedkar
(IIT Delhi)		 Compliant Data Analytics Under Regulatory Constraints

Jhala Ananya Jaidip
(Indian Institute of Information Technology Vadodara)
Leelavati Narlikar
(IISER Pune)		 Data-driven models for protein-DNA binding sites

Jagannatham Jahnavi
(Christ (Deemed to be University))
Mayank Vatsa
(IIT Jodhpur)		 Agentic Framework with RAG for Enhanced Generative AI

Rishi Jain
(Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Petroleum Technology)
Mayank Vatsa
(IIT Jodhpur)		 Agentic Framework with RAG for Enhanced Generative AI

Shruti Thiagu
(Shiv Nadar University Chennai)
Palash Dey
(IIT Kharagpur)		 Fair House Allocation: Algorithm Design and Implementation

Anshul Kaushal
(Panjab University)
Richa Singh
(IIT Jodhpur)		 Watermarking for Deepfake Identification

Aditya Priyadarshi
(International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore)
Saket Choudhary
(IIT Bombay)		 Genomic language models

Abhishek Verma
(Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, Patiala)
Shweta Jain
(IIT Ropar)		 Efficient Client Selection and Incentivization in Federated Learning

R Raghav Kaushik
(Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai)
Sriparna Saha
(IIT Patna)		 PoemTale Diffusion Framework : Connecting Verses and Visuals in Poetic Storytelling

Niladri Ghosh
(Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute)
Sriparna Saha
(IIT Patna)		 PoemTale Diffusion Framework : Connecting Verses and Visuals in Poetic Storytelling

Prachi Sharma
(IIT Kharagpur)
Swaprava Nath
(IIT Bombay)		 Cooperative game theory: Novel investigations

Arnav Samal
(NIT Rourkela)
Vineeth N Balasubramanian
(IIT Hyderabad)		 Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Teena Joseph
(Ramaiah Institute of Technology)
Vineeth N Balasubramanian
(IIT Hyderabad)		 Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Timeline for Uplink 2025

The time for all deadlines is 23:59 IST.

Feb 03, 2025Applications open
Feb 22, 2025Applications closed
Mar 25, 2025Candidates notified
Apr 15, 2025Selected interns announced on Uplink webpage
May 1, 2025Internship starts
Jun 15, 2025Midterm feedback
Jul 31, 2025Internship ends
Aug, 2025Final presentations

Application Process

  • The application is a two step process as detailed below. Please use the same email address in both steps.
    • Apply here to provide your academic details and upload your CV in PDF format, statement of purpose (SOP) in pdf format and scanned pdf of your most recent academic transcript / grade card from your institution clearly mentioning your program of study and CGPA. See below for guidelines for the resume & SOP.
    • Register and enroll on ICAPP portal. Follow the instructions on the portal to upload your CV, input your project preferences, and complete a short screening assessment. For any queries regarding ICAPP you may write to: icapp_dev@hotmail.com

Do note that without successfully completing both the steps, the application remains incomplete. Incomplete applications will not be considered for the program.

IKDD is not responsible for any data shared by the candidates to ICAPP.

Student Responsibilities

  • Selected students will be notified by email by IKDD with a copy to the faculty mentor. They must indicate their acceptance by email within the stipulated time along with a no-objection letter for conducting the internship full time from a designated authority (e.g. Head/Chair of the department where the student is enrolled). Otherwise, the internship offer will be withdrawn.
  • The student must get in touch with their mentors and start working full time on their internship from May 1, 2025.
  • The student must be available full time (40 hours per week) for the 3 month duration of the internship.
  • The student must complete an internship report and submit it to their faculty mentor by the last day of the internship.
  • The student must make an end-of-internship presentation to a group of experts which will be facilitated by IKDD.

Faculty Mentor Responsibilities

  • The faculty mentor should verify the no-objection certificate from intern’s parent institute at the start of the internship.
  • The faculty member will provide to the student a well-defined research problem and also relevant datasets for performing experiments at the start of the internship.
  • The faculty member will meet with the student (face to face or virtually) on a regular basis through the duration of the internship and provide guidance on executing the research project.
  • If the project execution requires additional computing infra-structure, the faculty member will provide access to such infra-structure to the student.
  • The faculty will provide an internship completion certificate to the student at the end of the internship.
  • The faculty member will inform IKDD about successful completion of the internship.
  • Upon acceptance of a paper based on the internship work, the faculty member will inform IKDD.

IKDD Responsibilities and Other Guidelines

  • IKDD will pay full stipend amount directly to the student on successful completion of the internship.
  • If a paper gets accepted in a Core-A* conference based on the internship work within 18-months of the commencement of the internship (i.e. the notification of paper acceptance must be received by 30th October, 2026 AoE), IKDD will provide a grant to the faculty member towards supporting registration and travel expenses for attending the conference. If a paper gets accepted in a CORE-A conference within the same 18 month cutoff period, IKDD will support the conference registration for one author. The faculty member will be free to decide who among the authors will register and/or attend the conference.
  • IKDD will have no stake in the IP generated through this collaboration/visit of the mentee to the host institution and beyond.
  • It is acknowledged by both parties that mentee pursuing research is purely voluntary and will not result in any obligation or liability on IKDD with regard to quality and/or standard of the research plan. IKDD will also not be responsible in any manner for any kind of misbehavior or disobedience on the part of the mentee or for any misuse of facilities provided by the host institute. IKDD India will not be liable to the host institute on any account except for the grant provided for the research project.

Resume Guidelines

  • The resume should be in pdf format and at most 3 pages in length. Font size should not be less than 10pt.
  • Mention your institute name, department name, duration of study, and CGPA right at the top of your resume. Otherwise your application will be rejected. Additionally, list all relevant courses and certifications. Specifically mention courses / certifications in probability and statistics, linear algebra, machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, data science, natural language processing, computer vision, etc.
  • Mention your coding skills, i.e. languages and proficiency level / years of experience. Proficiency in python (numpy, scipy, scikit-learn), R, and deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, Tensorflow, Keras, etc. are particularly relevant.
  • Mention and briefly describe any project (research or otherwise) that you have done on data science related topics. These may be course-related or other projects at your institute or internships that you have executed in academic or industrial settings. If any of your project code is publicly available (e.g. on github), include a link to it.
  • Mention any accepted or submitted paper to a research conference based on any of your projects. If the paper is publicly available, (e.g. in arxiv), include a link to it.

Statement of Purpose Guidelines

  • Use the statement of purpose (SOP) to explain what makes you qualified for this internship opportunity. The SOP should ideally have 3 parts. These should describe
    • your motivation and what you expect to gain out of this internship as well as explaining the rationale behind your choice of mentors,
    • any technical skills or experiences that strengthen your candidature to work on the internship problems offered by your choice of mentors, and
    • your challenges in getting access to good mentors and a research ecosystem.
  • The SOP must be in pdf format, at most 2 pages in length and use at least 10pt font.

Contact Us

For any query please send an email to IKDDOffice@gmail.com with subject "[Uplink]: email subject"

IKDD : ACM India Special Interest Group On Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining