Published: 09th July 2020
IIT Hyderabad collaborates with a multinational tech company to set up India's first AI centre to accelerate research
Housed at IIT Hyderabad, the NVAITC will focus on fundamental AI algorithms, as well as building solutions in the fields of Agriculture, Smart Cities, and Language Understanding
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Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad is collaborating with NVIDIA, a multinational technology company, to establish India’s first ‘NVIDIA AI Technology Centre’(NVAITC) to accelerate research on Artificial Intelligence and its commercial adoption.
An event was held today (9th July 2020) to mark the commencement of operations of this Centre. IIT Hyderabad already houses two NVIDIA DGX-1TM systems and an NVIDIA DGX-2TM system dedicated to research being undertaken at the institute. The NVAITC will accelerate research for the 220 faculty at IIT Hyderabad, which is already among India’s foremost research institutions in just over a decade into its inception.
Highlighting the significant benefits of this state-of-the-art facility, Prof. B.S. Murty, Director, IIT Hyderabad, said, “As an IIT with a strong fundamental and technological research focus, the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad is very happy to join NVIDIA’s NVAITC program. This combination of NVIDIA’s leading-edge technology for AI Compute and some of the finest minds in the country from IIT Hyderabad will bring synergy to help find solutions to uniquely Indian challenges, be it enhancing crop yield or safer cities. This will build on the strong AI capabilities IIT Hyderabad has built, including the country’s first B.Tech in AI program.”
This collaboration between IIT Hyderabad and NVIDIA will focus on advancing AI research in the areas of Agriculture and Smart Cities besides Language Understanding. The projects that would be taken up include increasing crop yield using AI algorithms and applying AI-based solutions to support safer transportation systems and better ways of managing traffic, among others.
Speaking about this collaboration, Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director for NVIDIA South Asia, said, “NVIDIA is powering the AI revolution across research facilities everywhere. Our collaboration with IIT Hyderabad will accelerate AI research and help create innovative solutions to real-world challenges.”
The NVAITC represents another step in NVIDIA’s collaborations within the state of Telangana. The State Government recently announced 2020 as the ‘Year of AI’ with an aim to establish Hyderabad among the top 25 global AI innovation hubs. NVIDIA is already a partner to the government of Telangana in this endeavour.
A Tech Session was also held today (9th July) focused on the following topics:
What are AI Containers? Why should we use them?
Is my model optimized and performant? Understand how to profile the AI models.
What is Mixed-Precision? How it is integrated into cuDNN and AI frameworks like PyTorch?
Tensor Cores and how the latest AI framework make use of specialized core to get more performance
How to make your model ready for deployment? TensorRT. By NVAITC India - Deepshikha, Bharatkumar
It must also be noted IIT Hyderabad was the first Indian Educational Institution to offer such a full-fledged B.Tech. program in AI and likely the third institute globally to offer a full-fledged B.Tech. Program in Artificial Intelligence in the Academic Year 2019-20.
IIT Hyderabad also has a Department of AI, which offers B.Tech., M.Tech. and different Minor Programs in AI besides undertaking cutting-edge R & D that is strongly entwined with academics. The mission of the AI Department is to produce students with a sound understanding of the fundamentals of the theory and practise of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, enabling them to become leaders in the industry and academia nationally and internationally.