‘Nilekani Centre for AI4Bharat’ launched at IIT-M campus

'Nilekani Centre for AI4Bharat’, aimed at advancing the state of Indian language technology through artificial intelligence and funded by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani and his wife Rohini, came into being at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) on Thursday.

Nilekani Philanthropies has pumped in Rs 36 crore in setting up the new centre which has made several “cutting-edge language AI resources open-source for widespread use.” Nilekani inaugurated the centre at the IIT-M campus in the presence of the institute’s director Prof V Kamakoti.

AI4Bharat was setup as an initiative of IIT-M to build open-source language AI for Indian languages, and over the past two years, a 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.

“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. AI4Bharat will further contribute to and accelerate the Indic language AI work as a public good and is fully aligned with the goals of the Bhashini mission,” Nilekani said.

Dr. Mitesh M. Khapra, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT-M said given the rich diversity of languages in India coupled with a rapidly expanding digital world, it is important to make significant advances in language technology to benefit the common man.

“While language technology has significantly improved for English and a few languages, Indian languages are lagging behind. The focus of the Centre would be to bridge this gap,” he said.

The Centre has made several cutting-edge resources open-source, which can be accessed by anyone. These models are freely available and can be downloaded from their webpage, the institute said.

Dr Kumar, Researcher, Microsoft Research and Adjunct Faculty, IIT-M said the Centre is advantageously situated at the intersection of academia, industry, and organisations working for public good. This allows its contributions to be broad-based, spanning cutting-edge AI research, open datasets as an infrastructure, and applications for use by people, he said.

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

Congratulating the team behind the ‘Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat,’ Prof Kamakoti said he was happy that IIT-M 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,” he said.

The Centre will focus on doing foundational work which can benefit society at large and hopes that start-ups and other industries working on Indian language technology will benefit from the datasets, tools, and pre-trained models thereby energising the ecosystem to do more for Indian languages.”