As dynamic fields, what we can do with and how we apply data science and artificial intelligence is almost constantly changing and growing. Research institutions, in particular, contribute to the discovery of new innovations and applications. Right now, we are seeing a significant amount of interesting research coming out of institutions in India, some of which are discussed below in this list of artificial intelligence labs in India.
Artificial Intelligence Research at IISc
The faculty and students at the India Institute of Science pursue a wide range of research interests, including image processing, knowledge graphs, and natural language understanding. One of the institute’s recent projects has been to solve the issue of cross-modal retrieval. They “ have developed a generalized semantic preserving hashing technique for cross-modal retrieval algorithms, which can work seamlessly for single and multi-label data, as well as in paired and unpaired scenarios.”
Machine Learning Lab
The Machine Learning Lab at the Department of Computer Science at the India Institute of Science has the ambitious goal of understanding artificial intelligence and its many facets, including NLP, machine learning, numerical optimization, and deep learning. Currently, the Machine Learning Lab is working on developing simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), a core component of achieving level 5 autonomy in self-driving vehicles.
Cryptography and Information Security Lab (CrIS Lab)
CRiS Lab’s main research focus is cryptography, specifically Multi-Party Computation (MPC) or the standard-bearer problem. The majority of their research can be classified into three overarching areas: fault-tolerant distributed computing, foundations of MPC, and applied MPC. In 2021 they published ABY2.0: Improved Mixed-Protocol Secure Two-Party Computation, which focuses on how they increased the efficiency of semi-honest, secure two-party computation.
Software Engineering and Analysis Lab (SEAL)
SEAL’s primary research focus is in four areas: program analysis and verification, machine learning for software engineering, trustworthy and deployable machine learning, and concurrency and distribution. In 2020 they published two papers, Learning and evaluating contextual embedding of source code and ActiveThief: Model extraction using active learning and unannotated public data.
Machine Learning Lab at IIT, Hyderabad
With a focus on the many theoretical foundations of machine learning, the Machine Learning Lab at IIT, Hyderabad investigates questions, such as “How machines and multi-agent systems should help in planning activities by learning from environments” and “How machines should learn in the presence of noisy environment[s] or partial supervision.”
CVIT at IIT Hyderabad
CVIT’s mission is to maintain a balance between applied and academic research in the fields of computer vision, image processing, machine learning, and computer graphics. One of their current projects aims to solve the challenge of taking speech segments and “generating continuous sign language videos” from them, which would significantly improve accessibility to the hard of hearing or deaf.
Computational Speech and Language Technologies (CSALT)
Currently, automatic speech recognition (ASR) is too resource-intensive for use with low-resource languages, limiting its accessibility. One of CSALT’s missions is to design speech processing techniques that would be appropriate for low-resource languages. In 2021, they published several papers, including Select, Substitute, Search: A new Benchmark for Knowledge-Augmented Visual Question Answering and Meta-Learning for Effective Multi-task and Multilingual Modelling.
School of Artificial Intelligence (ScAI)
One of ScAI’s main initiatives is to create multilingual NLP systems for knowledge base completion, information extraction, and machine translation. Their applied research is focused on the areas of health care, robotics, materials, and industry 4.0.
The Centre for Machine Intelligence and Data Science (C-MInDS)
A relatively new research institution, C-MInDS was founded in February 2020. Already its members have delved into research in multiple fields, including AI, machine learning, NLP, agent-based learning, and much more. C-MInDS’s recent research in social networking seeks to understand how fake news spreads in communities and groups.
Center for Indian Language Technology (CFILT)
Since its establishment, multilinguality and deep semantics have been the core focuses of CFILT’s research. As a result, some of the topics that CFILT has pursued include Lexical and Structural Disambiguation, Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, and Sentiment Analysis, among others.
The Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and AI (RBCDSAI)
RBCDSAI’s state mission is to “leverage data science to give insights to make actionable, reliable and impactful decisions for adoption in engineering, finance, and healthcare domains.” Recent research has focused on how to ensure that AI, which is quickly becoming ubiquitous in Indian society, does not discriminate against different groups in India’s lingually, culturally, and religiously diverse society.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the data science and AI research coming out of India and the APAC region right now. To learn more about the ways that AI may transform our lifestyles in the future, join us at ODSC APAC Virtual September 15th-16th.