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.

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.

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.