Mindtree, IISc Bangalore Partner to Advance Research in Artificial Intelligence

Mindtree, a global technology services and digital transformation company, has created an endowment focused on Artificial Intelligence research with the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore (IISc), India’s premier public establishment for research and higher education in science.

This partnership will facilitate teaching and research for AI in both Data Sciences and Natural Language Processing. This endowment will introduce the institute’s students to solving modern business problems using AI and machine learning, leading to develop high-impact solutions at scale.

IISc is India’s top ranked University in the Times Higher Education’s world university rankings 2019 and is dedicated to fostering innovation and critical thinking across science, engineering, design, and management.

Named as Mindtree Associate Professor Chair on Artificial Intelligence, the endowment fund is designed to attract dynamic faculty doing groundbreaking AI research with both technical scholars and domain experts. The inaugural Mindtree Associate Professor Chair has been awarded to Professor Vijay Natarajan, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Automation.

Prof. Natarajan has an experience of 12 years and works in the areas of scientific visualization, computational topology, and computational geometry. The main topics of research include topological methods for visualization; multiscale representation of large scale scientific data; geometric and topological simplification; and applications of visualization in life sciences, climate science, and material science. Prof. Natarajan’s research is set to impact next-generation data processing, analysis and visualization technology in the large.

Commenting on the association, Rostow Ravanan, CEO and Managing Director of Mindtree remarked, “Artificial Intelligence, considered the cornerstone of future technologies, needs an ideal ground for further research and development in India. IISc is perfectly poised to be this space, allowing the best minds interested in this area to innovate and develop unique AI-based solutions for current problems. Our collaboration with IISc will help create opportunities to strengthen research in AI and provide our clients an avenue to interact with some of the best minds working in this segment.”

“This association with Mindtree has substantially bolstered IISc’s capabilities in some of the most important domains that hold the key to the future of technology,” said Prof. Anurag Kumar, Director, IISc. “We look forward to receiving significant industry-specific exposure through this association, in modern AI and computation technology and the problems it solves. The initiative will open up a new territory for our students to learn, innovate, implement and execute unique ideas with a far-reaching positive impact.”