In an ET Education exclusive conversation, Sheeba Chauhan, Senior Associate, ET Education delved into India’s tech education ecosystem with Prof P J Narayanan, Director of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. India is now the second-largest higher education system in the world— home to over 1,100 universities. This expansive landscape focuses on research, deep-tech innovation, startup culture, and much more. One such trailblazer is the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad — a pioneer in AI, computer vision, robotics, natural language processing, and more. In this ET Education exclusive conversation, we delved into “What it takes to build a deep-tech academic powerhouse” with Prof. P J Narayanan, Director of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad

Setting new standards in legislative transparency, the IIITH, Punjabi University (PU) Patiala, and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) Noida, have digitised images of Punjab assembly debates dating back to 1947 and made them available online. The institutions have also created a search engine to enhance public accessibility. Not only that, the team has also made it inclusive with audiobooks. The search engine, developed under the guidance of CV Jawahar of IIITH, and Gurpreet Lehal, consultant at PU, is an initiative of the National Language Translation Mission, Bhashini. The institutions launched the project about two years ago. “Using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), we have converted scanned PDFs into searchable PDFs,” said Krishna Tulsyan, a research engineer from IIITH, who worked as team leader on the project. “Now, using the search engine, users can search for anything — not only in English, but also in regional languages — in these PDFs without even opening them.”

Three professors at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad have received research grants by the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) to grow and foster a culture of research and innovation in the country. Prof. Chittaranjan Hens, Centre for Computational Natural Sciences and Bioinformatics, Prof. Karthik Vaidyanathan, Software Engineering Research Centre and Prof. Gowtham Kurri, Signal Processing and Communications Research Centre have been awarded the Prime Minister’s Early Career Research Grant initiated under the Anusandhan National Research Foundation which supports young researchers in initiating their research careers in a new institution with the help of a flexible budget and progressive initiatives for the ease of doing research. Each research grant which is meant for young researchers no older than 42 years of age provides up to 60 lakhs plus overheads for a period of 3 years.