IIITH and swecha.org organizes AI Hackday, a mega hackathon with 2000 students building AI for public good
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.
NIMS Hyderabad and IIITH create pathology datasets for cancer & kidney research
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.
Viswam.ai – launched by IIITH and Swecha to create AI solutions for Global South
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.
IIITH Professor explores challenges and opportunities in emerging software architectures
Prof. Raghu Reddy lists out the current challenges in designing software architecture, talks about IIIT Hyderabad’s Software Engineering and Research Centre (SERC) current focus and gives a sneak peek into the future. To better understand the importance of software architecture, let’s first look at its evolution which spans across five ages. As per an article published in IEEE software, in the pre-1980s, the focus was primarily on monolithic systems. During the 1980s and 1990s, we began to explore distributed monolithic systems that offered multiple architectural views for different types of stakeholders.
TCS Grants Research Projects for FC Kohli Center
In the wake of establishing and funding research projects, TCS Established the FC Kohli Center at IIITH. In 2015, TCS established the FC Kohli Center on Intelligent Systems at IIITH as a platform to strengthen existing research and facilitate new activities in IT-related fields. To support impactful and long-term research, an endowment was created to fund ambitious projects. The Kohli Challenge Proposal (KCP) Scheme was introduced to identify and support deserving projects. The selection process involved multiple rounds of evaluation by internal and external reviewers, assessing criteria such as innovation, social impact, applied AI, spin-off potential, and system complexity.
IIITH Student wins first prize in Naval Hackathon
An algorithm developed by a third-year engineering student from the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH) to detect flying objects —helicopters, aeroplanes, drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), and birds — faster and more robustly, could soon be used by the Navy. The solution was developed by Rishabh Bhattacharya at a nationwide competition organised by the Navy to address real-world operational challenges with innovative technological solutions. He won a cash prize of Rs 3 lakh. Speaking to Times of India (TOI), on Thursday, Rishabh said the Navy asked him to conduct further research so that the solution can be integrated into their functioning.
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
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.