Mindtree partners with Indian Institute of Science to boost AI research

Technology services provider Mindtree has tied up with Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru to advance research in the field of artificial intelligence, the organisations said in a joint statement.

Mindtree said that the partnership will facilitate teaching and research for AI in both data sciences and natural language processing. 

"The partnership backed by an endowment will introduce the institute’s students to solving modern business problems using AI and machine learning," the statement said.

Named as the Mindtree Associate Professor Chair on Artificial Intelligence, the endowment fund is designed to attract faculty doing groundbreaking AI research with technical scholars and domain experts.

“Artificial Intelligence, considered the cornerstone of future technologies, needs an ideal ground for further research and development in India. IISc is perfectly poised to be in this space," Rostow Ravanan, chief executive and managing director of Mindtree, said.

The inaugural Mindtree Associate Professor Chair has been awarded to Professor Vijay Natarajan, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Automation.  

Professor Natarajan has 12 years of experience with specialisation in the areas of scientific visualisation, computational topology and computational geometry. 

Through the partnership, faculty will focus research topics such as topological methods for visualisation; multiscale representation of large-scale scientific data; geometric and topological simplification; and applications of visualisation in life sciences, climate science, and material science.

Other premier institutes in the country are also working on artificial intelligence-driven solutions.

In April, the central government’s top policy think tank, Niti Aayog, had tapped IIT-Delhi's AI tool that reveals and predicts the socio-economic conditions of areas right down to the district level using satellite images.

The project is expected to help policymakers make better decisions across healthcare, education, agriculture, sanitation, employment, and others.