What are some good areas of research in computer science at IIT Kanpur?

One of my uncles is a member of the faculty of the CS department of IIT Kanpur and thus most of the information in this answer is based on what I heard from him. The CS department of IIT Kanpur is one of the oldest and is known for its cutting-edge research work. The following points entail a few areas of research that the CS department of IIT Kanpur excels at.

Cyber-security and Cryptosystems

• More than 12 faculty members are experts in this field 
• Some achievements include private-key encryption algorithms for Indian Navy and Air designed by Prof. Manindra Agrawal.
• Prof. Indranil Saha who has expertise in robotics, control theory, and program analysis
• Professor Sandeep Shukla has more than 20 years of experience in cyber security of cyber-physical systems. 

Theoretical Computer Science

• This department provides research opportunities in areas such as algorithm design, complexity theory, etc.
• A few achievements that highlight the credibility of the department are; a best student paper award at ICALP 2016, 3 papers at the premier venue STOC 2016, and 3 recent acceptances at MFCS 2016.
• Major research areas in the department include graph algorithms (Prof. Surender Baswana, Prof. Shashank Mehta), streaming algorithms (Prof. Sumit Ganguly), information theory (Prof. Satyadev Nandakumar), etc 

Data Science

• This department has recently witnessed an increase in the number of professors and the versatility of research conducted
• Some thrust areas and the concerned professors are machine learning (Prof. Harish Karnick, Prof. Piyush Rai, Prof. Purushottam Kar), data management and mining (Prof. Arnab Bhattacharya and Prof. Medha Atre), computer vision and graphics (Prof. Vinay Namboodiri and Prof. Gaurav Sharma) an
• The department has bagged 3 NIPS 2015, 3 CVPR 2016, 2 AISTATS 2016, and 1 KDD 2016 paper.
• The reading group SIGML hosts seminars and guest lectures related to Machine Learning

Other areas of research in CS at IIT Kanpur include programming language and analysis computer architecture, mobile networks, biometrics and software architecture. Most of these projects and research work are led by individual professors.