Nilekani Center established by IIT-M to promote Indian language technology

The Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat was established by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras to advance the state of Indian language technology and make 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.

KEY POINTS:

• 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 because the objective is to energise the ecosystem to do more for Indian languages.
• 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 numerous contributions to Indian language technology, including cutting-edge Speech Recognition and Machine Translation models.

Things to Remember about IIT-Madras:

• Director of Indian Institute of Technology Madras: Kamakoti Veezhinathan
• IIT-Madras establishment year: 1959