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Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru and his students Arvindh Arun, Karuna K Chandra, Akshit Sinha, Balakumar Velayutham, Jashn Arora and Manish Jain from  Google DeepMind, Bangalore received best paper award for their research work on  Topo Goes Political: TDA-Based Controversy Detection in Imbalanced Reddit Political Data at BeyondFacts – 5nd International Workshop on Knowledge Graphs for Online Discourse Analysis (KnOD 2025), collocated with The Web Conference 2025 held at Sydney, Australia in May 2025

IIITH based BharatGen team launches Patram: India’s First Vision-Language Foundational Model for Documents

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.

Anemia Detection with Smartphone

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.