The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras has established the “Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat” to advance the state of Indian language technology and have a societal impact. Rohini and Nandan Nilekani have generously donated Rs. 36 crore to this Centre through Nilekani Philanthropies. According to the institute, this new centre will work to advance Indian language technology in order to have a greater impact.
Goal of developing open-source language AI for Indian languages
AI4Bharat was founded with the goal of developing open-source language AI for Indian languages. The team led by Dr Mitesh Khapra, Dr Pratyush Kumar, and Dr Anoop Kunchukuttan has made several contributions to Indian language technology over the last two years, including cutting-edge models for machine translation and speech recognition.
Nandan Nilekani inaugurated the IIT Madras Nilekani Centre. As part of the inaugural event, a workshop was held to discuss the resources available to build Indian language technologies.
Speaking about the launch of this centre, Mr Nilekani said, “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.”
