A new faculty chair backed by technology ecosystem veteran J.A. Chowdary will strengthen research and innovation in emerging technologies at IIIT Hyderabad as the institute enters its 30th year. The JA Chowdary Faculty Chair, established with support from Chowdary, founder of ISF and Junicorn 100K, will have a dedicated corpus. The initiative was announced at the institute’s 29th Foundation Day celebrations on Wednesday, held around the theme “Navigating the Future of AI & Technology.” Cyient Founder Chairman and Board Member and former Nasscom chairman B.V.R. Mohan Reddy was the chief guest and keynote speaker. He stressed the need for stronger academia-industry links to develop talent, drive innovation and translate research into real-world impact. The institute also presented its 2026 Alumni Achiever Awards to CEO of Character.ai Karandeep Anand; founder and CTO of LoadShare Networks Pramod Nair; and principal scientist at ServiceNow and assistant professor at McGill University Siva Reddy Goli.

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.