IIIT Hyderabad : The R&D Differentiator

For long, IIIT-Hyderabad has not received its fair share of limelight,
despite it being one of the best autonomous universities in the country.

IIIT-H scores high in all parameters in the DQ-IDC T-Schools Survey: the high
degree of indigenous research work carried out by the institute came for special
praise. "IIIT-Hs calling is research, and that is what purely differentiates
the institute from the other IIITs in the country," says Prof Rajeev Sanghal,
director, IIIT-H.

All academic programs even at the undergraduate level have a strong research
component which is unique in the country. The institute is divided in the form
of R&D centers, and not departments. In totall IIIT-H has twenty-four R&D
centers, all of which focus on sub-specialization areas in computer science.
Many of these research related work is then applied to real life situations. "As
we have introduced research based curricula even for the undergraduate level,
students are able to solve unstructured problems, even if they do not get into a
purely research intensive field in the future. This increases their
employability quotient," says Prof Sanghal.

Last year, the institute also diversified into the non-IT area called as
exact humanities, which is a trans-disciplinary program between computer
sciences and human sciences. "Students taking up this subject will receive dual
degrees, and will be adept at tackling social problems as well as human issues,"
says Jaydev GAG, head, communications, IIIT-H. Another concept that is very
unique to the institute is its focus on encouraging inter-disciplinary research.
Despite being a young institute, IIIT-H has filed eight patents till
dateanother major feather added to its cap. IIIT-Hs focus now is to build
domain expertise, and hence it has introduced niche subjects such as earthquake
engineering, and computational physical sciences.

Till about 2008, IIIT-Hs investments in research and research funds
consistently grew year after year. However, in 2009-10, due to the downturn the
inflow of funds has been affected. The pinch has been felt mainly because almost
50% of the institutes revenues come from corporate R&D. Companies such as
Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Cisco, IBM have multiple engagements with the R&D centers
at IIIT-H. The government sector and organizations such as DRDO, DRDL, ISRO, BEL
though have been consistent in their research funding and their joint research
activities.

According to Jaydev, IIIT-H students are not taught commercial languages, and
instead their analytical skills are honed, so that they develop new programs or
applications which can then be taught to other schools. Hence, the scope for
academic alliances or training programs with companies does not exist. However,
it still boasts of the best placements in the country, recession or no
recession. Despite being the last institute to open up its placement season
which lasts just about three weeks, it has managed 100% placements till date.

Prof Sanghal has big plans for IIIT-H going forward. "We hope that we will be
one of the strongest research groups not only in the country, but also this part
of the world. Language technology, as well as computer vision and image
processing are the key areas where our research groups are the largest in South
Asia as well as Southeast Asia. Our research is not only good for staple
publications, but also translates into technology and products. In the next two
years, we expect our research to get into society and industry in a fairly big
way, and we hope to make a national impact." The aim is to admit hundred
candidates to its PhD programs in computer science by 2012 to bolster innovation
within the country.

Priya Kekre

priyak@cybermedia.co.in