IIT Madras launches Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat

Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) has launched the ‘Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat’ with a vision of advancing the state of Indian language technology and creating societal impact.

Inaugurated on July 28, the Centre is being supported by Rohini and Nandan Nilekani with a grant of ₹36 crore, the institute has informed.

“AI4Bharat was setup as an initiative of IIT Madras to build open-source 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,” an official statement said.

Congratulating the team behind the ‘Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat,’ 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 cutting edge research being translated to real-world use.”