Databased Annual Fest 2025

Organisers: Databased, the UG Computer Science crew at IISc and Kotak IISc AI–ML Centre
Date: 25–26 October 2025

The Databased Annual Fest 2025 was organised by Databased, IISc’s Undergraduate Computer Science Club under the guidance of Pandu Rangan, Chair Visiting Professor, Kotak IISc AI–ML Centre. The event was sponsored by KIAC. IISc students and faculty came together for two days of presentations, discussions, and a quiz celebrating ideas at the intersection of mathematics, computing, and intellectual curiosity. Inspired by the success of the Algorithms Festival held in the previous year, this edition expanded its scope to encompass a broader range of topics across computer science.

The faculty talks included ‘Aha! Proxy re-encryption’ by Professor Pandu Rangan, ‘Algorithms, randomness, and geometry’ by Professor Arindam Khan, and ‘Explainability, model surgery, and quantum EM: vignettes in ML’ by Professor Chiranjib Bhattacharyya. There were 11 student presentations: (i) Intent beyond instructions; (ii) Trust in a trustless world: tales of byzantine agreements; (iii) Black Scholes model; (iv) Voronoi’s sleeping beauty; (v) Zero-knowledge proofs: proofs in disguise; (vi) From strategy to solution: computing Nash equilibria with Lemke–Howson; (vii) Uncertainty across the stack: From Bayesian learning to probabilistic machines; (viii) Simulation of open quantum systems: a Markovian approach; (ix) Think before you move! Decoding games with numbers; (x) The algorithmic gambler’s guide to losing efficiently; and (xi) Ranking the Web: How Google’s PageRank algorithm changed search forever.

The Fest provided a forum for the exchange of ideas and interdisciplinary exploration, fostering collaboration and active engagement among the participants.