In an interview with Business World team, Prof. P J Narayanan describes the industrial, social and healthcare applications of the translational research being carried out at the institute. Answering a question, Prof. P J Narayanan says, IIITH has been a leader in AI and related areas through the Kohli Centre on Intelligent Systems (KCIS) that was endowed by TCS in 2015. Our strengths include all core Al areas including machine learning, cognitive science, data analytics, natural language processing, speech processing and synthesis, robotics, computer vision, etc. Building on the foundations of academic research, we have been focusing on applied and translational research in the past several years. This involves research with specific industrial or social application as the focus. We established two entities – INAI and RCTS – for large-scale applied research. The Technology Innovation Hub established by the DST at the institute has data-driven applications as its focus and works synergistically with the institute’s research centres and labs.

A team from IIITH has introduced Patram-7B-Instruct, India’s first vision-language foundational model designed specifically for complex document understanding. This landmark achievement is part of the BharatGen initiative, a government-supported program to develop India-centric Multimodal Large Language Models, funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST). Patram-7B-Instruct is a 7-billion parameter AI model trained on a large, diverse corpus of Indian documents. It can analyze scanned or photographed documents and respond accurately to natural language instructions, making it a versatile tool for varied applications across sectors. Despite its relatively compact size, Patram surpasses larger international models such as DeepSeek-VL-2 on prominent benchmarks like DocVQA and VisualMRC.

Arjun Rajasekar describes how pallor detection is being used by the Raj Reddy Center for Technology and Society (RCTS) as a non-invasive method of detecting anemia. Capitalizing on the rise of AI and the ubiquity of consumer smart devices, RCTS has been exploring AI applications to improve maternal and child well-being. One of the first medical conditions chosen for exploration has been anemia, a globally prevalent issue affecting approximately 29.9% of women aged 15–49 and 39.8% of children aged 6–59 months in 2019. These rates are even higher in India, with estimates from the National Family Health Survey indicating that over 50% of women and 59% of children aged 6–59 months are anemic to varying degrees. Such widespread prevalence poses a substantial public health challenge. Anemia is characterized by a deficiency in the number of red blood cells or the hemoglobin concentration within them, resulting in a diminished capacity to transport oxygen to bodily tissues.