Hexagon R&D India, IIIT Hyderabad partner to advance Digital Twin Research
The International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT Hyderabad) and measurement technologies firm Hexagon R&D India on Wednesday announced their collaboration to establish the Hexagon Digital Twin Centre of Excellence (CoE) at the campus of the institute. The CoE will focus on driving applied research, education, and industry collaboration in computer vision, spatial computing, and digital twins, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), according to a statement. The collaboration aims to provide students, faculty, and researchers at IIIT Hyderabad access to Hexagon’s advanced precision imaging laser scanner, which enables high-fidelity digital twin creation. “This collaboration with Hexagon will give our researchers and students access to advanced technologies and real-world spatial data, creating opportunities to take research from the lab to practical applications. We look forward to building a strong research and innovation ecosystem through this Centre of Excellence,” IIIT Hyderabad director Prof Sandeep K Shukla said.
BTech CSE/AI&ML: What should a student choose after Class 12?
For engineering aspirants, choosing between BTech Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) and BTech Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI & ML) can be confusing. While both programmes share several computing fundamentals, their focus differs in terms of breadth and specialisation. Prof Kishore Kothapalli, Dean, Academics, IIIT-H, explains the key differences to help students understand what each course offers. As per the dean, CSE provides a broader foundation across computer science and computing systems, while AI & ML combines computing fundamentals with greater emphasis on artificial intelligence, machine learning, mathematics, statistics and data-driven applications. The mathematics component is also important. He says AI & ML places greater emphasis on probability, statistics, linear algebra, optimisation and mathematical modelling. However, curricula vary between institutions, so students should check the detailed syllabus before making a choice. Prof Kothapalli notes that both programmes require problem-solving, analytical ability, computational thinking and the ability to learn new technologies.
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.
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
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.
IIIT-H sets up new centre to redefine learning in the age of AI
With artificial intelligence becoming all-pervasive, the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT Hyderabad) is setting up a new research centre, the Centre for Educational Technology and Learning Sciences (CETLS), to explore how people, including students and older people, learn in the age of AI, and how to help them improve their cognitive skills. Centre for Educational Technology and Learning Sciences – CETLS will focus on students up to Class 12, higher education, executive training, and learning for the third age. Instead of arguing for a blanket ban on AI in the classroom, the centre plans to focus on helping children improve their cognitive skills. The Centre for Educational Technology and Learning Sciences will work with schools to gain insights into the actual learning process, which it can then use to refine and improve educational methods. Globally known AI thought leader and the International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT-H) founder Raj Reddy will address the inaugural event on September 5 at the institute’s Gachibowli campus.
IIIT-H launches JA Chowdary Faculty Chair on its Foundation Day Celebrations
A new faculty chair backed by technology ecosystem veteran J.A. Chowdary will strengthen research and innovation in emerging technologies at IIIT Hyderabad as the institute enters its 30th year. The JA Chowdary Faculty Chair, established with support from Chowdary, founder of ISF and Junicorn 100K, will have a dedicated corpus. The initiative was announced at the institute’s 29th Foundation Day celebrations on Wednesday, held around the theme “Navigating the Future of AI & Technology.” Cyient Founder Chairman and Board Member and former Nasscom chairman B.V.R. Mohan Reddy was the chief guest and keynote speaker. He stressed the need for stronger academia-industry links to develop talent, drive innovation and translate research into real-world impact. The institute also presented its 2026 Alumni Achiever Awards to CEO of Character.ai Karandeep Anand; founder and CTO of LoadShare Networks Pramod Nair; and principal scientist at ServiceNow and assistant professor at McGill University Siva Reddy Goli.
Engineering The Energy Transition | IIIT Hyderabad’s Roadmap for Al, Research and Innovation
India’s energy transition is becoming increasingly technology-driven, requiring smarter grids, advanced computing, data-led decision-making and skilled professionals. As the country expands renewable energy. green hydrogen and grid automation, stronger links between technology, research and education will be essential. In this conversation, Prof. Sandeep Kumar Shukla, Professor & Director, IIIT Hyderabad, speaks with Nandini Jha of Elets News Network about leveraging Al, computing and research to address India’s energy challenges, from smarter grids and predictive maintenance to green hydrogen and digital SCADA. IIIT Hyderabad’s strengths in machine learning time-series forecasting, signal processing and lot map directly onto this load and renewable-generation forecasting. Our Smart City Living Lab already treats the campus as an instrumented testbed for energy, water and air quality data, which gives students real sensor streams rather than synthetic datasets.
FUN, FUTURE,AND LINGUISTICS
IIIT Hyderabad’s Linguistics
professor Parameswari
Krishnamurthy says that
what constantly excites her
most about the discipline is
that “it’s both creative and logical”. It’s like
mathematics and literature
marrying each other when
on a normal day, people
regard them as two sides of
a coin that do not see eye to
eye. “We use language
everyday and you
unconsciously know that
there are certain facts about
the language which you
don’t know why but you still
use it”, she describes. This year, IIIT
Hyderabad-backed Indian
team won multiple medals
at the International
Linguistics Olympiad
conducted in Romania.
Krishnamurthy, who was
part of it and led the team, explained how these patterns
and problems are truly like
puzzles. In a linguistic
olympiad, it is just full puzzle
mode. Unlike science
olympiads with its theorems,
Krishnamurthy says “there is
some reality” here because
real language data is given to
you with which you try to
gure out patterns. In fact, Krishnamurthy
says that it is like machine
learning where the machine
gets a small amount of data
and it learns the pattern.