IIT Madras Launches Centre to Create Open Source AI

IIT Madras Launches Centre to Create Open Source AI

TECH DIGEST– The “Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat” was officially opened by the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) on Thursday. The goal of this new centre is to advance Indian language technology. Through Nilekani Philanthropies, Rohini and Nandan Nilekani have generously donated Rs 36 crore to support this Center.

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A workshop was given as part of the launch event to talk about the resources available to develop Indian language technologies for companies, researchers, and students. IIT Madras launched AI4Bharat as a project to create open-source language AI for Indian languages. The group lead by Dr. Mitesh Khapra, Pratyush Kumar, and Anoop Kunchukuttan has produced numerous contributions to Indian language technology during the past two years, including cutting-edge models for Speech Recognition and Machine Translation.

Speaking about the technology being developed at the Centre, Dr Anoop Kunchukuttan, Researcher at Microsoft said, “Building AI technologies for the diverse set of Indian languages is expensive given the need for large datasets and computing power. In this context, we are grateful that several organizations have been supporting the efforts to build open-source AI.”