Image Courtesy : www.iitm.ac.in

On July 28, 2022, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras launched the Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat on the IIT Madras campus. The Centre aims to further the state of the Indian language technology for societal impact and to build open-source language AI for Indian languages. Nilekani Philanthropies, owned by Rohini and Nandan, has provided Rs. 36 crores for the Centre.

The Centre has made exceptional contributions to Indian language technology, including state-of-the-art subjects for machine translation and speec recognition. The Centre has built many resources open-source on which anyone can get hands-on from the IIT Madras AI4Bharatwas webpage- ai4bharat.iitm.ac.in/

The Indian Institute of Technology Madras Nilekani Centre was inaugurated by Nandan Nilekani. As a part of the inaugural function, a workshop was also held to discuss the resources available to construct Indian language technologies. Nandan Nilekani reported that the Digital Bhashini mission has been launched with the objective of all services and information being open to nationals in their language, with combined AI at the core of the design. Nilekani also added that AI4Bharat would further accelerate and contribute to Indic language AI work as a public good and is fully aligned with the goals of the Digital Bhashini mission.

Director of IIT Madras, V Kamakoti, congratulated the team responsible for the Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat and expressed her happiness that IIT Madras is taking a leadership role in the Indian language AI which is of national importance. She also added she is looking forward to AI4Bharat's cutting-edge research being translated to real-world use.