Pune hosts ICNDIA 2026 on 18 and 19 September, an international conference focused on digitalisation, artificial intelligence and the uses of emerging technology. The meeting is held at the Army Institute of Technology in association with IEEE and is intended to bring together researchers, academics, industry representatives and innovators.

The announced programme includes scientific papers, invited talks, thematic discussions and an exhibition. Topics cover both the development of intelligent systems and their application to practical engineering and societal problems. For participants, the point is not only to publish a paper but to compare methods and test results in front of colleagues from outside their own laboratory.

Pune’s role as host reflects the city’s profile as a centre of technical education and industry. The Army Institute of Technology, the campus that houses the conference, works in that academic network; IEEE supplies the professional frame of an engineering society with recognised standards and journals. Together they signal that the debate on artificial intelligence is not confined to the largest hubs in the United States or Western Europe.

As artificial-intelligence tools are adopted at speed, questions of validation, safety and practical usefulness matter as much as raw technical performance. Meetings of this kind let researchers show where a model succeeds and where it fails before an application is described as ready for use.

The exhibition and the contact between academia and industry complement the paper sessions. They can open collaborations, but they do not replace scientific scrutiny. Attractive titles in artificial intelligence require, if anything, more care about data, the reproducibility of experiments and the limits authors themselves declare.

Anyone planning to attend should check registration details, the day-by-day timetable and any remote sessions on the conference website rather than on secondary notices. Times, rooms and the final list of papers can still change in the days before the event.

ICNDIA 2026 will not settle the argument about artificial intelligence. It does, for two days, give digitalisation research a place to be presented, challenged and, where it holds up, turned into joint work. In a field that moves quickly, that discipline of confrontation remains part of the work, not a ceremonial extra.

Photo: Vikrant More14 / Wikimedia Commons. Main hall of the College of Engineering Pune, an engineering campus in the city, not the Army Institute of Technology conference venue. CC BY-SA 3.0. Cropped to 16:9.

Source consulted: ICNDIA 2026 | Army Institute of Technology Pune; Army Institute of Technology Pune; IEEE.