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IIIT Hyderabad and Hexagon R&D India Partner to Advance Digital Twin Research

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DSAA-2026: Call for Participation

The International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT-H) is hosting its 29th Foundation Day Celebrations with a special focus on “Navigating the Future of AI & Technology”. The Chief Guest of the occasion is BVR Mohan Reddy, Founder Chairman & Board Member, Cyient; Former Chairman, Nasscom.

The program includes a plenary panel discussion titled “Deepening Industry-Academia Collaboration”, bringing together prominent tech leaders: Sirisha Voruganti, CEO & MD, Lloyds Technology Centre India; Mohit Dhingra, CEO & President, CIBC India; and Ramesh Kaza, EVP & Country Head, LPL GCC.

Additionally, the event will celebrate notable former students through the Alumni Awards. Honourees include

Karandeep Anand, B.Tech Hons CSE 1999–2003, CEO of Character.ai

Pramod Nair, B.Tech Hons CSE 2004–2008, Founder & CTO of LoadShare Networks and

Siva Reddy, DD CSE 2005–2010, Principal Scientist at ServiceNow and Assistant Professor at McGill University, Mila.

Event Details:
Date & Time: Wednesday, September 2, 2026 at 4:00 PM
Venue: H-105, IIIT-H

Rogue AI more about man than machine

Has Artificial Intelligence gone rogue? It may sound so if one were to go by the dire warnings coming from tech titans like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta amid revelations of a series of alarming incidents of swarms of AI agents hacking into other organisations. By now, people are familiar with the breaking out of AI agents into the Hugging Face systems and calls for regulation. Karthik Vaidhyanathan, Assistant Professor at the Software Engineering Research Centre, IIIT-Hyderabad, opines that the significant change now is that AI is moving beyond its traditional role as a prediction engine. “What is changing now is that it can understand what the human is trying to say and then perform the action. A conventional AI system, for instance, could identify flights between Hyderabad and Bengaluru. An AI agent could potentially understand a user’s preferences, search flights, compare them, select one and complete the booking,” he explains. The difference is tool use. If AI can generate code, it can also generate a call to a function that actually performs an action. “The combination of large language models, tool calling and memory is moving AI from predicting text to performing actions,” he says.

Senses & Self by Silver Rooms

Additionally, the event will celebrate notable former students through the Alumni Awards. Honourees include

Karandeep Anand, B.Tech Hons CSE 1999–2003, CEO of Character.ai

Pramod Nair, B.Tech Hons CSE 2004–2008, Founder & CTO of LoadShare Networks and

Siva Reddy, DD CSE 2005–2010, Principal Scientist at ServiceNow and Assistant Professor at McGill University, Mila.

Event Details:
Date & Time: Wednesday, September 2, 2026 at 4:00 PM
Venue: H-105, IIIT-H

IIIT-H study: Al struggles with spoken Telugu

Artificial intelligence systems can struggle to understand spoken Telugu, with speech recognition and translation errors sometimes changing the meaning of questions and leading to incorrect answers, a study by researchers from IIIT-H has found. The researchers developed VakQA, which they describe as the first benchmark for evaluating spoken question-answering in Telugu. It contains 2,001 factoid question-answer pairs covering science, general knowledge, politics, history, culture, and geography, along with 2.53 hours of speech recordings. Tests found that translating Telugu questions into English reduced Gemini’s performance on 18.8% of questions, while switching from Telugu text to speech reduced performance on 21.2%. The researchers said the findings show how errors can accumulate across a voice-al pipeline and underline the need to evaluate AI directly in Indian languages rather than assume that performance in English will translate to Telugu. VakQA was developed by IIIT-H researchers and Santosh Kesiraju of Brno University of Technology. The benchmark has been publicly released and was accepted for presentation at IEEE Spoken Language Technology 2026.

IIIT Hyderabad Alumnus Karandeep Anand Appointed as Disney’s First Corporate CTO

Disney chief Josh D’Amaro, in a move that shows he’s trying to position the Mouse House as a tech-forward entertainment company, has tapped veteran technology executive Karandeep Anand as its first chief technology officer. Most recently, Anand was CEO of Character.AI, a generative AI chatbot company. About a year ago, Disney accused Character.AI of “blatantly infringing” its copyrights and sent the tech startup a cease-and-desist letter demanding it remove Disney characters from its platform. Character.AI complied with the request. As CTO, Anand will oversee enterprise technology, infrastructure, data and AI platforms, product and engineering. He will work across the technology teams in Disney’s segments to “further modernize” how the company builds and delivers technology company-wide. Anand holds a computer science degree from the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. He also has a marketing and strategy certification from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

IIIT-Hyderabad releases book on evolution of UPI

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IIIT-Hyderabad releases book on evolution of UPI

Former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) D. Subbarao on Saturday said UPI may look like an inevitable revolution today but it is the result of years of institutional choices, technological innovation and determined execution. Speaking at the release of a book ‘Cashless Nation: How UPI Changed Everything’ authored by Santanu Paul and B. Sambamurthy, he said UPI is not just a new payment product. It is a new payment ecosystem — an open, interoperable public infrastructure that has transformed financial inclusion and enabled unprecedented private innovation. The International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad, which played host to the event, said the book chronicles the origin story of UPI and the rise of India as a digital superpower. UPI celebrated its 10th anniversary this year. Congratulating the authors, IIIT Hyderabad Director Sandeep Shukla said it is a well-researched book that captures an important transformation in India’s journey towards a cashless nation. UPI is a technology that has made the world sit up and look at India as a global leader in payment technology.

A research paper titled “VRSpecML: A Profile for Realizing Domain-Specific Virtual Reality Systems,” co-authored by Bavya Sri and Sai Anirudh Karre, with collaboration from Prof. Y. Raghu Reddy, has been accepted to the New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) Track of MODELS 2026 – International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, a CORE A conference. The conference is scheduled to be held from 4–9 October 2026 in Málaga, Spain.

A research paper titled “VRSpecML: A Profile for Realizing Domain-Specific Virtual Reality Systems,” co-authored by Bavya Sri and Sai Anirudh Karre, with collaboration from Prof. Y. Raghu Reddy, has been accepted to the New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) Track of MODELS 2026 – International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, a CORE A conference. The conference is scheduled to be held […]

A research paper by Software Engineering Research Center (SERC) undergraduate students Hemang Jain, Shailender Goyal, and Divyansh Pandey, co-authored with Dr. Karthik Vaidhyanathan, titled “Dissecting Transformers: A CLEAR Perspective Towards Green AI,” has been accepted as a main conference paper at Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2026).

Prof. Nimmi Rangaswamy and her student, Pratyay Suvarnapathaki, have been featured on the cover story of Interactions, one of ACM’s leading publications showcasing Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) research from around the world. This impressive double victory reflects the students’ dedication, discipline, and strong teamwork, along with the invaluable guidance and support of their coaches. IIIT-H teams winners […]