IIT Madras: Centre to build Open-source AI for Indian languages

Highlights:

• On July 29, 2022, the “Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat’ was launched, in a bid to build Open-Source AI for Indian Languages. 
• It was launched by the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT) Madras.

• The Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat will work to advance Indian Language technology.
• Rohini and Nandan Nilekani are supporting the centre, with a grant of Rs 36 crore via Nilekani Philanthropies.
• During the launch ceremony, a workshop open to students, researchers, and start-ups was organised, in a bid to discuss the resources available for building Indian language technologies.

• AI4Bharat is an initiative by IIT Madras.
• It has been started to build open-source language AI for Indian Languages.
• In last two years, a team led by Dr Mitesh Khapra, Dr Pratyush Kumar and Dr Anoop Kunchukuttan has contributed to Indian language technology, which also include state-of-the-art models for Machine Translation and Speech Recognition.
• This initiative would contribute to and accelerate Indic language AI work as a public good.
• It has been aligned with objectives of Digital India Bhashini Mission.
• The Digital India Bhashini mission was launched with the objective of making all services and information available to citizens in their own language.
• Collaborative AI is at the core of the design. 
• In India, there is a rich diversity of languages, which required to be in sync with the expanding digital world.
• Thus, it is essential to make significant advances in language technology for the benefit of common man.
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