S. Vishnu Sharma
IIT 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 on 9 June 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.
IIT Hyderabad 2020
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.
Speaking more about this facility, IIT Hyderabad director Professor B.S. Murty said as an IIT with a strong fundamental and technological research focus, IIT 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.
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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.
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 endeavor.
A technical session was held on the premises of IIT Hyderabad on topics like 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?,
The other topics are Tensor Cores and how the latest AI framework make use of specialized core to get more performance and How to make your model ready for deployment? TensorRT.
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.
Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH) is one of the six new Indian Institutes of Technology established by the Government of India in 2008.
In a short span of around a decade, the institute built on an imposing 570-acre campus.
It has been ranked among the top ten engineering institutes in India for five consecutive years in National Institute Ranking Framework (NIRF) released by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Government of India. The Institute was Ranked #8 in ‘Engineering’ category and Ranked #17 in ‘Overall’ category in NIRF Rankings 2020.
The Institute was also ranked #10 in the first edition of Atal Ranking of Institutions on Innovation Achievements (ARIIA) introduced in 2019 by MHRD to systematically rank all major higher educational institutions and universities in India on indicators related to ‘Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development’ among students and faculties.
IIT Hyderabad has been placed in 601-650 Ranking Band and secured 10th Position in India as per QS World University Rankings 2021. The Research Output of the Institute was ranked as ‘Very High.’The Institute was also ranked among the 10 Best Institutes in India.
IIT Hyderabad has close to 211 full-time faculty, 2,869 students of whom 20 per cent are women, nearly 200 state-of-the-art laboratories and five research and entrepreneurship centers.
The Institute has a strong research focus with more than Rs. 500 crore of sanctioned research funding while Ph.D. scholars account for about 30 per cent of total student strength.
IIT Hyderabad students and faculty are at the forefront of innovation with more than 1,500 research publications and patent disclosures, 300 sponsored/consultancy projects and 50 industry collaborations.
IIT Hyderabad has MoUs with 50 universities in the U.S., Japan, Australia, Taiwan and Europe. IITH has been pioneering change in pedagogy with fractal academic programs that atomizes course modules, encourage interdisciplinary learning spanning innovative technology, fundamental science, liberal arts and creative arts like photography, theatre and painting.