ICA 2026 at IIT Ropar: ANNAM.AI's AI-in-Farming Conference

ICA 2026, the 4th International Conference on Agriculture-Centric Computation, runs from 1 to 4 November 2026 at IIT Ropar in Rupnagar, Punjab. It is hosted by ANNAM.AI, the Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence for Digital Agriculture at IIT Ropar. The theme is "AI Meets Farm – Digital Agriculture for a Sustainable Future". Registration is open on the official site: ₹9,440 for academics and ₹15,000 for industry from India and SAARC countries, both including GST.

Independent guide. ICA 2026 is organised by IIT Ropar through ANNAM.AI. Register on the official site. IndianAgri is not an organiser, partner or agent.

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Fees and inclusions as shown on the official registration page on 21 October 2026. Payment is online, through Cashfree, for both rupee and dollar registrations. The paper and poster deadlines (15 August, 25 September and 6 October) and the travel-grant deadline (10 October) have passed; registering to attend has not.

ANNAM.AI is the Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence for Digital Agriculture at IIT Ropar, set up with support from the Ministry of Education, Government of India. The name stands for Alliance for Next-Gen Nourishment through Agriculture Modernization. It is one of three national AI Centres of Excellence created under the Ministry of Education's ₹990 crore programme, according to AgroSpectrum (17 February 2026).

The conference site lists its work as precision farming, crop monitoring, computer vision, weather intelligence, digital twins, robotics, multilingual AI and decision support. The AgroSpectrum report names three systems: the Annam Chat Engine (ACE), a farmer advisory chatbot; SWAN, a network of smart weather stations; and the Krishi Intelligence Platform, for crop identification, crop damage assessment and pest detection. Its first phase covers Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.

In March 2026, IIT Ropar said ANNAM.AI had put 100 weather stations in Punjab, free to farmers, to guide sowing, irrigation and crop protection (PTI, 26 March 2026). The Centre's own site is annam.ai.

The organisers publish a tentative schedule, marked "subject to change". As read on 21 October:

• Sunday 1 November: workshops. Three workshop slots (11:00, 14:30 and 16:30), then a Bhangra session in the evening.
• Monday 2 November: the opening. Inauguration at 9:00, the first keynote, invited talks 1 to 5, the first paper session, the first panel discussion, and the conference dinner.
• Tuesday 3 November: the busiest day. The second keynote, invited talks 6 to 8, and three rounds of parallel paper sessions.
• Wednesday 4 November: the close. Invited talk 10, the second panel discussion and a last round of parallel sessions, ending with lunch.

The paper sessions are grouped by subject: computer vision for crop quality and field monitoring; deep learning for crop disease and pest detection; IoT and edge computing; advisory and crop management systems; predictive modelling of farm processes; explainable plant health assessment; remote sensing for crop mapping; and digital agricultural ecosystems and privacy. A research poster session runs alongside.

To give a feel for the papers, the accepted list includes grain quality checks from photos (ICAR-CIPHET Ludhiana), pest and disease detection in brinjal (ICAR-NRIIPM), a lightweight maize disease model (IIT Ropar), drone monitoring of coconut plantations, and a tool that checks AI-written crop advice for dangerous errors.

The speakers page lists, on 21 October:

• Keynote: Rabi Narayan Sahoo, Indian Agricultural Research Institute
• Invited: Prof. Aruna Tiwari (IIT Indore), Dr Niranjan Singh (NCIPM, New Delhi), Dr C. S. Murthy (Senior Advisor, Digital Agriculture, ICRISAT), Dr Partha Pratim Das (Ashoka University), Dr Madan Kumar Jha (IIT Kharagpur) and Dr Sree Ranjani (Senior Publisher, Elsevier)

That is seven names against the ten invited talks on the poster, so more may be added. The conference's general co-chairs are Dr Tomas Norton (KU Leuven) and Dr Mukesh Kumar Saini (IIT Ropar); the patron is Prof. Rajeev Ahuja, Director of IIT Ropar.

Workshops: the poster counts two, on AI and digital agriculture, and the schedule shows three slots on 1 November. Titles and leaders had not been published on 21 October (the tutorials page says "coming soon"). Check the official site before you plan around one.

The organisers call it "India's top research conference on AI for Agritech"; that is their description. Here is our reading of who gets most from it.

Researchers and students. This is a computer-science conference about farming, not a farm science conference with a computing session. If you work on crop images, sensors, remote sensing or farm data, the room is full of your reviewers. Earlier editions' papers are in Springer CCIS, so the format is familiar to any CS department.

Agritech startups. Ten talks and forty-odd papers in four days is a fast way to see which labs are working on your problem, and who to approach for a pilot or a hire. The academic fee does not apply to you; the industry rate is ₹15,000.

Agri companies and state departments. Go to see what is ready for farms and what is still a paper. The papers on disease detection, crop mapping and advisory checks are the closest to field use.

Farmers. This is not a kisan mela. The programme is papers, talks and panels, and the fee is set for professionals.

What the field actually uses AI for, in plain terms:

• Disease and pest detection from photos. A phone picture of a leaf, read by a trained model. Two of this year's ICA sessions are about exactly this.
• Crop mapping from satellites. Which crop is growing where, and how well, without a field visit. Remote sensing has its own session at ICA 2026.
• Advisories in the farmer's language. Chat systems such as ANNAM.AI's Annam Chat Engine, which give local weather, crop and market advice.
• Hyperlocal weather. Village-level stations, like the 100 ANNAM.AI has placed in Punjab, feeding sowing and spraying decisions.
• Quality grading. Cameras that sort grain or produce by size and defect, as in the ICAR-CIPHET paper at this year's conference.

Ropar sits in Punjab, which grew about 17.1 million tonnes of wheat in 2025-26 (3rd advance estimates), roughly 14% of India's crop and third among the states, plus about 12.5 million tonnes of rice — see the Punjab wheat and Punjab rice pages in our Atlas. A research centre that wants to test crop models on real fields could hardly be better placed.

For a longer look at what makes farm AI useful rather than just clever, read our piece on AI in agriculture.

From the venue page:

• By air: Chandigarh International Airport (IXC) is about 60 km away, 1.5 to 2 hours by prepaid taxi or bus from Chandigarh ISBT (Sector 43). From Delhi, fly to Chandigarh (about an hour) and go on by road.
• By train: Ropar Junction (RPAR) is about 2.5 km from the campus, 10 to 15 minutes by auto or taxi, with direct trains from Delhi and Chandigarh.
• By road: Delhi is about 300 km away.

Accommodation is not in the fee. The organisers suggest hotels in Chandigarh, Mohali and Zirakpur, 45 to 55 km from the campus, and say they do not guarantee rooms or prices. Allow for the drive each morning.

The conference started at IIT Ropar and has moved between institutes since. From the official site's past-editions pages:

Note the move from May to November this year. If you are planning for ICA 2027, watch the official site rather than assuming a May date.

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