AI Hackday, a mega AI hackathon, was conducted on 25th Jan 2025 as the first round towards kickstarting a series to build people-centric AI development. This is organised by viswam.ai, a center setup at IIITH by IIITH and swecha.org. The AI Hackathon is a 3-stage series fostering innovation and creativity, culminating in AI Days 2025′ Spark Camp, where 100 production-ready AI applications are developed to address India’s unique challenges. Inaugurating the hackathon, Bhavesh Mishra, IAS, highlighted the need to leverage the AI revolution early, citing the success of non-Western models like DeepSeek LLM, and emphasised on how India can also build its own context-driven AI models.

IIIT Hyderabad, in collaboration with Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS), has released digitised datasets of histopathological images focused on brain cancer and kidney disease (lupus nephritis). The effort, dubbed India Pathology Dataset (IPD) project, a collaborative initiative involving academia, hospitals, industry, and govt, aims to digitise tissue biopsy slides. It also seeks to prevent damage to physical slides, improve clinical decision-making, accelerate diagnosis and enable AI-driven research. Supported by the Technological Innovation Hub for Data Banks, Data Services, and Data Analytics (TiH-Data), IIIT Hyderabad installed a whole slide digital scanner at NIMS.

In a groundbreaking initiative, the open source activists association Swecha and IIITH have joined forces to launch viswam.ai, a Centre of Excellence dedicated to developing AI solutions tailored to the unique needs of the Global South. Kiran Chandra, Centre Head of Viswam.ai, and Prof. Ramesh Loganathan, IIITH, this ambitious project seeks to “democratise access to AI” by “leveraging community resources and expertise”. “The driving force behind viswam.ai is a belief that current AI models, often developed by large corporations in the Global North, are ill-suited to address the challenges faced by the Global South,” – Y Kiran Chandra.