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Celebrating 25 years of language research

NLP may be mainstream in undergraduate colleges today but 25 years ago it was a niche field taking its tentative steps at IIITH. As the Language Technology Research Centre (LTRC) rings in its silver jubilee, here’s an account of its glorious journey.
No mention of LTRC’s genesis is complete without a simultaneous reference to Akshar Bharati. For the uninitiated, the latter is a personification of a group that came together in the early 1980s to work on the computer processing of Indian languages, laying special emphasis on the traditional Indian theories of language. “It was set up at IIT Kanpur by the pioneers of language technology research in India, Prof. Rajeev Sangal and Vineet Chaitanya ji,” reminisces Prof. Dipti Misra.

Experts Urge Earthquake-Resistant Techniques for Hyderabad’s High-Rises

Dr Pravin Venkat Rao, assistant professor at IIIT Hyderabad’s Earthquake Engineering Research Centre, explained that earthquake-resistant building design focused on minimising damage and ensuring safety during seismic events. “Unlike ‘earthquake-proof’ buildings, which are impractical and excessively costly due to the rarity of strong earthquakes in the region, quake-resistant buildings are designed to withstand shaking without collapsing,” Prof. Venkat Rao explained. “While these buildings may suffer damage, such as cracks, their structural integrity is maintained to prevent catastrophic failure and protect occupants”.

Mobility Initiatives From The IIITH Stable

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Mobility Initiatives From The IIITH Stable

The impact of AI on our daily lives is manifold. Technological innovations are disrupting various industries too, from education and healthcare to manufacturing and transportation, to name a few. In the field of transportation, self-driving cars have particularly gripped everyone’s imagination. But the mobility ecosystem has expanded over the last few years to go beyond autonomous navigation. The i-Hub-Data centre located on IIITH campus has been actively involved in various applications that are multi-disciplinary in nature for mobility-based problems. One of them concerns detecting abnormal traffic patterns and rule violations on Indian roads.

IIITH’s Smart And Sustainable Robotic Research

At the recently concluded International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024) that was held in Abu Dhabi, IIITH’s Robotics Research Centre made a splash with a presentation of 6 research papers. Since 1988, IROS, one of the largest and most important robotics research conference in the world, has been providing a platform for the international robotics community to exchange knowledge and ideas about the latest advances in intelligent robots and smart machines. The theme of IROS 2024 was “Robotics for Sustainable Development“ with a focus on highlighting the role of robotics in achieving sustainability goals.

Distinguished Lecture by Prof. Rajesh P N Rao (9 December 2024)

Speaker: Prof. Rajesh P N Rao, University of Washington, Seattle, USA

Title: The Predictive Brain: An Active Predictive Coding Framework for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

Date: 9 December 2024

Summary of the talk: More than half the volume of the human brain is occupied by the neocortex which has delineated roles of visual perception in the visual cortex, action in the motor cortex, cognition in the prefrontal cortex, etc. However, recent experiments indicate that almost all cortical areas, even those traditionally labelled as sensory, are modulated by upcoming actions. Parallel data from anatomical studies point to major outputs from almost all cortical areas to sub-cortical centers that control the body. In this talk, Prof Rao will present the active predictive coding framework, which puts actions center stage in natural and artificial intelligence. He will review the Bayesian brain hypothesis, and then discuss predictive coding, a specific implementation of the Bayesian brain hypothesis that acknowledges cortical anatomy and physiology. This sets the stage for his more recent active predictive coding model, which suggests new explanations for how we recognize an object and its parts using eye movements, why perception seems stable despite eye movements, how we learn compositional representations of the world, how we plan complex actions by composing sequences of sub-goals and simpler actions, and how we form episodic memories of our sensory-motor experiences and learn abstract concepts such as a family tree. The talk will also briefly cover his work on brain co-processors that use artificial intelligence to interact directly with the brain to restore or augment human function.
About the speaker: Prof. Rajesh P N Rao is the CJ and Elizabeth Hwang Professor in the Paul G Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle. He is also the co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology, adjunct professor in the Bioengineering department, and faculty member in the Neuroscience Graduate Program at UW. His research interests span computational neuroscience, brain-computer interfaces, and artificial intelligence.

Celebrating 25 Years of LTRC (6 and 7 December 2024)

Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC) at IIIT, Hyderabad is celebrating its Silver Jubilee (25 years of completion) in a two day event on 6 and 7 December 2024.
Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC) was established in October 1999 in response to the preeminent scientific challenge of our time – enabling machines to read, understand and derive meaning from human languages especially in the Indian context and Indian languages. It was, perhaps, first such a research theme focused centre in the country and today LTRC is the largest academic centre of speech and language technology in South Asia.
LTRC at IIITH, founded 25 years ago, has become one of India’s leading institutions in Language Technology research.