The International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT Hyderabad) and measurement technologies firm Hexagon R&D India on Wednesday announced their collaboration to establish the Hexagon Digital Twin Centre of Excellence (CoE) at the campus of the institute. The CoE will focus on driving applied research, education, and industry collaboration in computer vision, spatial computing, and digital twins, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), according to a statement. The collaboration aims to provide students, faculty, and researchers at IIIT Hyderabad access to Hexagon’s advanced precision imaging laser scanner, which enables high-fidelity digital twin creation. “This collaboration with Hexagon will give our researchers and students access to advanced technologies and real-world spatial data, creating opportunities to take research from the lab to practical applications. We look forward to building a strong research and innovation ecosystem through this Centre of Excellence,” IIIT Hyderabad director Prof Sandeep K Shukla said.

Has Artificial Intelligence gone rogue? It may sound so if one were to go by the dire warnings coming from tech titans like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta amid revelations of a series of alarming incidents of swarms of AI agents hacking into other organisations. By now, people are familiar with the breaking out of AI agents into the Hugging Face systems and calls for regulation. Karthik Vaidhyanathan, Assistant Professor at the Software Engineering Research Centre, IIIT-Hyderabad, opines that the significant change now is that AI is moving beyond its traditional role as a prediction engine. “What is changing now is that it can understand what the human is trying to say and then perform the action. A conventional AI system, for instance, could identify flights between Hyderabad and Bengaluru. An AI agent could potentially understand a user’s preferences, search flights, compare them, select one and complete the booking,” he explains. The difference is tool use. If AI can generate code, it can also generate a call to a function that actually performs an action. “The combination of large language models, tool calling and memory is moving AI from predicting text to performing actions,” he says.

Artificial intelligence systems can struggle to understand spoken Telugu, with speech recognition and translation errors sometimes changing the meaning of questions and leading to incorrect answers, a study by researchers from IIIT-H has found. The researchers developed VakQA, which they describe as the first benchmark for evaluating spoken question-answering in Telugu. It contains 2,001 factoid question-answer pairs covering science, general knowledge, politics, history, culture, and geography, along with 2.53 hours of speech recordings. Tests found that translating Telugu questions into English reduced Gemini’s performance on 18.8% of questions, while switching from Telugu text to speech reduced performance on 21.2%. The researchers said the findings show how errors can accumulate across a voice-al pipeline and underline the need to evaluate AI directly in Indian languages rather than assume that performance in English will translate to Telugu. VakQA was developed by IIIT-H researchers and Santosh Kesiraju of Brno University of Technology. The benchmark has been publicly released and was accepted for presentation at IEEE Spoken Language Technology 2026.