Mindtree partners with IISc to boost funding in artificial intelligence research

Indo-American IT firm Mindtree has partnered with the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (IISc) to boost funding for artificial intelligence research carried out at the country’s leading scientific research institute. The new fund, called the ‘Mindtree Associate Professor Chair on Artificial Intelligence’, is aimed at teaching and research in the fields of AI in Data Science and Natural Language Processing, the company said in a recent statement. With the endowment, Mindtree and IISc hope to nurture indigenous research in the use of AI and machine learning, and eventually in developing high-impact solutions on a large scale. “Artificial Intelligence, considered the cornerstone of future technologies, needs an ideal ground for further research and development in India,” Rostow Ravanan, CEO of Mindtree, was quoted as saying in the statement. “IISc is perfectly poised to be this space, allowing the best minds interested in this area to innovate and develop unique AI-based solutions for current problems.”

With the endowment fund, Mindtree and IISc hope to attract scholars and domain experts working on groundbreaking AI research. The inaugural Mindtree Associate Professor Chair was awarded to Dr Vijay Natarajan, associate professor in IISc’s Computer Science and Automation department for his work in scientific visualisation, computational topology (CT) and computational geometry, the statement said. “Our collaboration with IISc will help create opportunities to strengthen research in AI and provide our clients with an avenue to interact with some of the best minds working in this segment,” Ravanan was quoted to have said. Senior IISc officials said that the new association has considerably boosted the institute’s capabilities to explore important domains in the country’s technological advancement. “We look forward to receiving significant industry-specific exposure through this association, in modern AI and computation technology and the problems it solves,”  Prof Anurag Kumar, director, IISc was quoted to have said. “The initiative will open up a new territory for our students to learn, innovate, implement and execute unique ideas with a far-reaching positive impact.”