US-China rivalry threatens global AI safeguards; IIIT Hyderabad director flags Israel challenge
In an interview with Mint on October 13, 2026, Sandeep Kumar Shukla, director of the International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT Hyderabad), said global guidelines are needed to manage AI risks, but geopolitical tensions between the US and China could make it difficult for countries to agree on slowing its development. Shukla explained how advanced AI could help detect software vulnerabilities that decades of human expertise have failed to uncover. The same capabilities, however, could make cyberattacks easier and enable malicious actors to develop dangerous technologies. He said governments should focus on regulating the use of AI in military operations rather than on preventing individual countries from developing AI systems.
IIIT-Hyderabad study cautions against blindly trusting medical AI models
Medical AI tools are increasingly being used in medical imaging, where radiologists rely on them as a second pair of eyes to flag possible abnormalities in scans. However, a study by International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) – Hyderabad researchers cautioned against blindly trusting output from such medical AI models. The research team led by Prof. Parameswari Krishnamurthy, with Dr. Syed Faizan as principal investigator, at the Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC), audited four vision-language models — MAIRA-2, MedGemma-4B, LLaVA-Med-1.5 and LLaVA-1.5 — on thousands of publicly available chest X-rays. The team also conducted a reader study in which two radiologists assessed anonymised overlays, providing a human reference for the models’ localisation.
IIIT Hyderabad launches Advanced EEG Lab to advance cognitive neuroscience research
IIIT Hyderabad has launched BrainLab, an advanced human electroencephalography (EEG) research facility to enable cutting-edge research into how the human brain processes information, attention, perception and behaviour. The new facility has been established with support from the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India, under the Fund for Improvement of S&T Infrastructure (DST-FIST) programme. The Cognitive Science Lab (CSL) received the grant in 2024 under the Life Sciences FIST (FIST-LS) programme. The grant-winning team comprised Prof. Bapi Raju, Dr. Vishnu Sreekumar, Dr. Bhaktee Dongaonkar, Dr. Vinoo Alluri, Dr. Priyanka Srivastava, and Dr. Kavita Vemuri.
IIIT Hyderabad’s INAI is using low-cost dash cams to detect traffic violations from moving vehicles
Hyderabad’s Applied AI Research Centre (INAI), low-cost cameras mounted on police and towing vehicles are being paired with artificial intelligence and computer vision to turn road footage into actionable traffic-enforcement data. The system can identify violations such as wrong-side driving, helmetless riding and triple riding, read licence plates and feed verified evidence into the e-challan system. CE spoke to Govind Krishnan, head of engineering, Mobility, INAI, to understand how the technology works, the challenges of deploying AI on the road and what lies ahead. “INAI’s objective is to take research in areas such as artificial intelligence and computer vision and translate it into solutions for real-world problems,” he said.
National-level recognition for IIIT researchers; Amazon selects four of them
Four research students from the International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT-H), a research institute in Gachibowli, which is not only a home for research but also recognised as a higher education institution at the national and international level, have been recognised at the national level. A list of the top 100 artificial intelligence/machine learning researchers in India has been compiled. Four research students from IIIT Hyderabad have found a place in it. It is a special privilege that Amazon has recognised these four students from IIIT Hyderabad. They are Asitva Srivastava, Nilga, Kiran Ravish, and Chirag Parikh. They were congratulated by several IIIT-H professors, faculty representatives, officials, and research students.
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.
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.
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.