IIT-Madras: Spearheading socially responsible, inclusive AI innovations

CHENNAI: The Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) has emerged as a beacon of artificial intelligence (AI) research and development in India.

Through a confluence of interdisciplinary research, strategic partnerships, and a commitment to societal impact, the institute is charting a course toward responsible and inclusive AI.

Democratising AI for Indian languages

AI4Bharat, an initiative under IIT-M, is dedicated to advancing AI technologies for Indian languages through open-source contributions.

The lab focuses on areas such as transliteration, natural language understanding, generation, translation, automatic speech recognition, and speech synthesis.

A nationwide initiative aims to gather 15,000 hours of transcribed data from over 400 districts, encompassing all 22 scheduled languages of India.

Parallelly, an in-house team of over 100 translators is creating a parallel corpus with 2.2 million translation pairs across these languages. To further this mission, the ‘Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat’ was launched, supported by a grant of Rs 36 crore from the Nilekani Philanthropies.

This centre aims to promote Indian language technology with the intention of creating a societal impact.

Championing responsible AI

The Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI) at IIT-M is an interdisciplinary research centre focusing on the ethical development and use of AI.

Under an MoU with Ericsson Research, CeRAI is working on research activities that envision deploying AI systems responsibly within the Indian ecosystem.

Prof Manu Santhanam, dean (Industrial Consultancy and Sponsored Research) at IIT-Madras, remarked, “Research on AI will produce the tools for operating tomorrow’s businesses. IIT-M believes in impactful translational work in collaboration with the industry.”

CeRAI has also received a $1 million grant from Google to further its research in responsible AI, he said.

Nurturing future leaders

Established with an endowment of Rs 110 crore from alumnus Sunil Wadhwani, the Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI (WSAI) is the newest department at IIT-M.

The school offers programmes such as BTech in AI and Data Analytics, and MTech in Data Science and AI.

Prof B Ravindran, founding head, WSAI, opined: “Data Science and AI are inherently interdisciplinary, and our aim is to leverage this to address impactful problems of direct relevance to society. At WSAI, we also host research centres like the AlphaGrep Quantitative Research Lab, focusing on financial technology research, and collaborating with industry partners to advance AI applications in various domains.”

Advancing interdisciplinary AI research

The Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBCDSAI) at IIT-M was founded in 2017 to expand research and education in AI and data science.

The centre focuses on leveraging AI in domains such as engineering, finance, and healthcare. RBCDSAI has received significant support, including a $1 million grant from Google, to further its mission of becoming an internationally renowned centre for data science research.

Innovative initiatives

Implementing its commitment to making AI education accessible and relevant, the institute’s Centre for Outreach and Digital Education (CODE), in collaboration with WSAI, has launched short-term certificate programmes in AI domains, including Data Science and AI – Leadership Essentials, and Responsible AI – Tour.

These programs are delivered online and include interactive components to facilitate learning.

Furthermore, IIT Madras has partnered with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to launch an 18-month-long MTech programme in Industrial AI, designed to upskill employees in applying AI to industrial problems. It's completely online and has a live teaching mode via virtual classrooms.

Collaborations, partnerships

IIT-M collaborates with industry partners to translate research into real-world applications. The institute has partnered with Altair to launch an eMobility Simulation Lab, focusing on research and training in the electric vehicle domain.

Prof V Kamakoti, director, IIT-M, stated, “Given the State government’s focus on eMobility and rapid expansion of the market, there is a need for IIT-M to play its role in the academic space. Our research park has been instrumental in fostering collaborations between academia and industry, hosting events like ‘Vision & AI Technology – Towards Industry 4.0’ to explore AI applications in the process industry.”

Through these multifaceted initiatives, IIT-M continues to lead in AI research and education, fostering innovations that are not only technologically advanced but also socially responsible and inclusive.