India’s energy transition is becoming increasingly technology-driven, requiring smarter grids, advanced computing, data-led decision-making and skilled professionals. As the country expands renewable energy. green hydrogen and grid automation, stronger links between technology, research and education will be essential. In this conversation, Prof. Sandeep Kumar Shukla, Professor & Director, IIIT Hyderabad, speaks with Nandini Jha of Elets News Network about leveraging Al, computing and research to address India’s energy challenges, from smarter grids and predictive maintenance to green hydrogen and digital SCADA. IIIT Hyderabad’s strengths in machine learning time-series forecasting, signal processing and lot map directly onto this load and renewable-generation forecasting. Our Smart City Living Lab already treats the campus as an instrumented testbed for energy, water and air quality data, which gives students real sensor streams rather than synthetic datasets.

IIIT Hyderabad’s Linguistics professor Parameswari Krishnamurthy says that what constantly excites her most about the discipline is that “it’s both creative and logical”. It’s like mathematics and literature marrying each other when on a normal day, people regard them as two sides of a coin that do not see eye to eye. “We use language everyday and you unconsciously know that there are certain facts about the language which you don’t know why but you still use it”, she describes. This year, IIIT Hyderabad-backed Indian team won multiple medals at the International Linguistics Olympiad conducted in Romania. Krishnamurthy, who was part of it and led the team, explained how these patterns and problems are truly like puzzles. In a linguistic olympiad, it is just full puzzle mode. Unlike science olympiads with its theorems, Krishnamurthy says “there is some reality” here because real language data is given to you with which you try to gure out patterns. In fact, Krishnamurthy says that it is like machine learning where the machine gets a small amount of data and it learns the pattern.

The Impact of Al-Generated Text on the Internet, by researchers from Imperial College London, the Internet Archive and Stanford University, found that by mid-2025, roughly 35 per cent of newly published websites were classified as Al-generated or Al-assisted, up from zero before ChatG-P’T’s launch in late 2022. PJ Narayanan, the former Director of the International Institute of Information Technology-Hyderabad (IIIT-H), felt that the dominance of AI-generated content on the Internet is a major concern, and these percent-ages will steadily rise as Al tools improve and gain wider adoption. “While humans can only cre-ate content at a fixed, limited pace, individuals and com-panies utilising powerful AI systems can generate data at an exceptionally high rate, practically without limits,” he said. Citing the Pew study, he said, “One direct con-sequence will be on future Al systems, as their training data will contain far more AI-generated material, poten-tially degrading their quality over time. More subtly, people interacting with online content may uncon-sciously alter their writing styles to mimic AI,” he said.