Infosys co-founder and non-executive chairman Nandan Nilekani on February 21 hailed IIT-Madras professor Mitesh Khapra and his work in Artificial Intelligence (AI).
“Mitesh Khapra at IIT-Madras, he's building this AI4Bharat which is part of the Bhashini program. It's amazing what he's done,” Nilekani said.
He was responding to a question from Nalin Mehta, Managing Editor, Moneycontrol, during a session at AIMA in New Delhi, whether driving AI’s digital public infrastructure would require visionaries like himself, who built the Aadhaar, or Dilip Asbe, often called the "UPI man of India" to replicate that success in AI.
AI4Bharat is a research lab at IIT-Madras that works on developing open-source datasets, tools, models, and applications for Indian languages. Khapra is an associate professor at IIT Madras in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
Last year in November, IIT Madras, AI4Bharat, and Sarvam AI launched IndicVoices, a ground-breaking 12,000-hour multilingual speech dataset spanning 22 Indian languages and 208 districts.
The dataset and the IndicASR model support all 22 official languages, offering an open-source blueprint for scalable multilingual data collection.
Nilekani added he has a belief that DPI and now DPI plus AI is the way to go for a large country like India.
In 2009, as the UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India), which issues Aadhaar numbers to all residents, the team came together, and NPCI also took shape.
The collaboration between the two played a crucial role in developing important systems like the Aadhaar-enabled KYC, the Aadhaar-enabled payment system, and Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT).
"Both organisations worked closely together to build critical infrastructure," Nilekani said, highlighting how these efforts laid the foundation for seamless authentication and financial inclusion at scale.
Meanwhile, Khapra was a researcher at IBM Research India, focusing on machine translation, deep learning, and more. He earned his PhD and MTech from IIT Bombay, receiving notable recognitions, including the IBM PhD Fellowship and the Microsoft Rising Star Award.
His accolades also include the Google Faculty Research Award, in 2018.
Also, read: Infosys, AI4Bharat, People+AI, four others join AI Alliance
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