IIITH Student wins first prize in Naval Hackathon
An algorithm developed by a third-year engineering student from the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH) to detect flying objects —helicopters, aeroplanes, drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), and birds — faster and more robustly, could soon be used by the Navy. The solution was developed by Rishabh Bhattacharya at a nationwide competition organised by the Navy to address real-world operational challenges with innovative technological solutions. He won a cash prize of Rs 3 lakh. Speaking to Times of India (TOI), on Thursday, Rishabh said the Navy asked him to conduct further research so that the solution can be integrated into their functioning.
LTRC: Celebrating a Legendary Research Centre
NLP may be mainstream in undergraduate colleges today but 25 years ago it was a niche field taking its tentative steps at IIITH. As the Language Technology Research Centre (LTRC) rings in its silver jubilee, here’s an account of its glorious journey.
No mention of LTRC’s genesis is complete without a simultaneous reference to Akshar Bharati. For the uninitiated, the latter is a personification of a group that came together in the early 1980s to work on the computer processing of Indian languages, laying special emphasis on the traditional Indian theories of language. “It was set up at IIT Kanpur by the pioneers of language technology research in India, Prof. Rajeev Sangal and Vineet Chaitanya ji,” reminisces Prof. Dipti Misra.
Experts Urge Earthquake-Resistant Techniques for Hyderabad’s High-Rises
Dr Pravin Venkat Rao, assistant professor at IIIT Hyderabad’s Earthquake Engineering Research Centre, explained that earthquake-resistant building design focused on minimising damage and ensuring safety during seismic events. “Unlike ‘earthquake-proof’ buildings, which are impractical and excessively costly due to the rarity of strong earthquakes in the region, quake-resistant buildings are designed to withstand shaking without collapsing,” Prof. Venkat Rao explained. “While these buildings may suffer damage, such as cracks, their structural integrity is maintained to prevent catastrophic failure and protect occupants”.
Mobility Initiatives From The IIITH Stable
The impact of AI on our daily lives is manifold. Technological innovations are disrupting various industries too, from education and healthcare to manufacturing and transportation, to name a few. In the field of transportation, self-driving cars have particularly gripped everyone’s imagination. But the mobility ecosystem has expanded over the last few years to go beyond autonomous navigation. The i-Hub-Data centre located on IIITH campus has been actively involved in various applications that are multi-disciplinary in nature for mobility-based problems. One of them concerns detecting abnormal traffic patterns and rule violations on Indian roads.
IIITH’s Smart And Sustainable Robotic Research
At the recently concluded International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024) that was held in Abu Dhabi, IIITH’s Robotics Research Centre made a splash with a presentation of 6 research papers. Since 1988, IROS, one of the largest and most important robotics research conference in the world, has been providing a platform for the international robotics community to exchange knowledge and ideas about the latest advances in intelligent robots and smart machines. The theme of IROS 2024 was “Robotics for Sustainable Development“ with a focus on highlighting the role of robotics in achieving sustainability goals.
When Modern AI Meets Classical Robotics
IIITH’s Self Driving Car is an electric vehicle that performs point to point Autonomous Driving with collision avoidance capabilities over a wide area. Equipped with 3D LIDAR, Depth Cameras, GPS systems and AHRS (Attitude and Heading Reference System which essentially means sensors on three axes to estimate it’s orientation in space), the car can also accept Open Set Natural Language commands and follow those commands to reach a desired destination. SLAM-based point cloud mapping is used to map the campus environment and a LIDAR-guided real-time state estimation allows for localization while driving.
GenAI Tech by IIITH Team Enhances Accessibility For Indian e-Tailers
Spearheaded by IIT Bombay under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS) of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), the initiative aims to create generative AI systems that can generate high-quality text and multimodal (speech and computer vision) content in various Indian languages. The implementation of the project is by the TIH Foundation for IOT and IOE at IIT Bombay with academic partners from other academic Institutes that include IIT Bombay, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, IIM Indore, and IIT Madras.
Sushil Umasudhan – International Olympiad in Informatics champion
When IIITH’s Sushil Raaja Umasudhan won the silver medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI-2024) at Alexandria recently, it was his third international medal. He won the silver medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI-2024), held at Alexandria, Egypt in September this year. He and his team had earlier won the bronze at Hungary’s IOI-2023 and Gold medal in this year’s Asia Pacific Informatics Olympiad (APIO-2024), an online competition hosted by China in which 35 countries from the Asia Pacific region participated.
IIITH’s social incubator hosts Roundtable on Startup Innovation in Climate Action
IIITH’s Social Incubator, AIC-IIITH, held a roundtable discussion on ‘Financial and Non-Financial Support for Startup Innovation in Climate Action’ at IIITH. This collaborative event brought together key stakeholders to discuss challenges and solutions for supporting climate-tech startups through financial mechanisms, policy enhancements, and ecosystem collaboration. Participants in the Roundtable included Gareth Wynn Owen, British Deputy High Commissioner to Hyderabad, and representatives from RICH and IIITH.
Efficiency and security for financial applications with federated learning
AI and ML have significantly impacted our daily lives, including financial services. Consider a specific scenario: a company wants to create a module for predicting loan defaulters and offer it as a service to different banks. The company aims to enhance customer experiences and refine the underlying machine learning models. To achieve this, the company needs to gather data from client banks to improve the models. However, due to legal and privacy concerns, banks may be hesitant to share their data. Such situations have led to the concept of federated learning (FL).