The ‘Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat’ was established by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras today with the goal of advancing Indian language technology and having a positive social impact. Rohini and Nandan Nilekani have donated Rs 36 crore through Nilekani Philanthropies to fund this Center, which was opened by Nandan Nilekani.
IIT Madras launched the AI4Bharat programme to create open-source language AI for Indian languages.
The center’s main goal will be to carry out fundamental research that will be helpful to society as a whole. All the research data would be accessible to start-ups and other sectors working on Indian language technology since the objective is to energise the ecosystem to do more for Indian languages. The official website for the Center, ai4bharat.iitm.ac.in, provides access to this data, which includes pre-trained models, tools, and datasets.
“Considering the wide range of languages spoken in India and the quickly growing digital world, it is crucial to create substantial advancements in language technology for the benefit of the average person. While English and a few other languages have seen substantial advancements in language technology, Indian languages are trailing behind. Dr. Mitesh M. Khapra, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Madras, stated that the Center’s main goal will be to close this gap.
Over the years, Drs. Mitesh Khapra, Pratyush Kumar, and Anoop Kunchukuttan have served as the center’s directors. IIT-Madras says that their group has made several contributions to Indian language technology, including cutting-edge Speech Recognition and Machine Translation models.
