‘Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat’ in IIT-M

CHENNAI: Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-Madras) is launching the ‘Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat’ to advance the state of Indian language technology with the intention to create societal impact. This Centre is being supported by Rohini and Nandan Nilekani with a generous grant of Rs 36 crore through Nilekani Philanthropies.

This new Centre will work on advancing Indian language technology to create a wider impact. It was inaugurated in the campus on July 28 by Nandan Nilekani. As part of this launch event, a workshop open to students, researchers, and startups was held to discuss the resources available to build Indian language technologies.

AI4Bharat was setup as an initiative of IIT-Madras to build opensource language AI for Indian languages. Over the past two years, the team led by Dr Mitesh Khapra, Dr Pratyush Kumar and Dr Anoop Kunchukuttan has made several contributions to Indian language technology, including state of the art models for Machine Translation and Speech Recognition. Nandan Nilekani said, “The Digital India Bhashini mission has been launched with the goal of all services and information being available to citizens in their own language with ‘collaborative AI’ at the core of the design.”

Prof V Kamakoti, Director, IIT-Madras, said, “I am happy that IIT-Madras is taking a leadership role in Indian language AI which is of national importance. I am looking forward to AI4Bharat’s research being translated to real-world use.”