R&D Showcase 2025

Andhra Jyothi (Print) Eenadu (Print) Eenadu-1 (Print) Sakshi (Print) Sakshi-1 (Print)

R&D Showcase 2025

IIITH’s annual R&D Showcase provided a unique opportunity for viewers to interact with faculty and students to understand their work in more tangible forms through demos, prototypes and presentations in keeping with the institute’s endeavour to promote applied research that benefits society. This year’s Showcase was themed Tech for Sustainable Futures was held on 8 and 9 March. The Showcase included 300+ research posters, demos and models from IIITH’s 28 research centres, confluences, research reflections and a research startup showcase by Centre for Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE). The event had roundtable discussions, plenary panel discussions, student seminars, industry-research dialogues etc. Prof. Martial Herbet, Dean and University Professor of Robotics, School of Computer Science, CMU gave the inaugural talk on Challenges towards the next generation of AI sytems.

Facing the Reality of Modern AI

Modern AI is poised to ignite the world — in all senses! Built upon different architectures of deep neural networks, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision Models (LVMs) enable computers to understand and generate text and visual content. They are not just transforming industries, they are reshaping the very fabric of how we seek and express knowledge in the ocean of data in the world, most of which cannot be known by any single human individual. As academia and industry come together to unlock their full potential, it’s crucial to examine the workings behind these models, and look at the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. At the core, there really is no magic. The models are designed to recognise patterns, generate content or make predictions by minimising a loss function by propagating errors backwards through multiple deep layers of a neural network, arranged in various architectures.

IIITH’s Smart Fix for Hyderabad’s Water Woes

IIITH along with treating water for reuse and collecting rainwater, made use of various smart solutions – in-house sensors and the creation of a digital twin, among others to preserve water and responsibly use it. According to researchers, one of the foremost things needed to address water woes is to understand the water consumption to plug leakages and also remove illegal connections. They also measure water quantity and quality using sensors. Wherever possible, the institute uses water treated through sewage treatment plants (STP) or collecting using rainwater harvesting so that the groundwater and even water supplied by the HMWSSB remains untouched or at least minimised. They have signed an MoU to run a trial to see if the IIITH model can be implemented in a nearby colony. Smart City Living Lab, IIITH is also in talks with other municipalities to help them address water woes.

Innovative ML model -switching approach for real-time traffic monitoring on smartphones

Four CSE second-year students of IIITH’s demonstrated a dynamic ML model switching approach on smartphones for real-time traffic monitoring. students have come up with a dynamic machine learning (ML) model-switching technique on smartphones, enabling real-time traffic monitoring that adapts to changing conditions depending on the traffic flow. The team comprising undergraduate second-year CSE students – Kriti Gupta, Ananya Halgatti, Priyanshi Gupta, and Larissa Lavanya – under PhD student Akhila Matathammal’s mentorship and guidance of Prof. Vaidyanathan, who is part of software Architecture 4 Sustainability group at Software Engineering Research Centre, worked on a dynamic model switching approach titled EdgeML Balancer, for object detection on edge devices such as smartphones.