One of the oldest and prestigious technology institute Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur has chosen Hyderabad to set up its Centre on AI and Advanced Manufacturing.

By | Business Bureau | Published: 10:04 pm 2:20 pm

Hyderabad: Telangana government’s focus on emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cyber Security, Data Analytics is finally getting national attention.

One of the oldest and prestigious technology institutes, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur has chosen Hyderabad to set up its Centre on AI and Advanced Manufacturing. While the Centre is likely to come up eventually, the institute is looking to start a six-month course in both these subjects from February, 2019 in Hyderabad.

“IIT-Kharagpur is situated in one corner of the country and they don’t get too many guest faculty and industry leaders so easily. So they were scouting around to set up their centre in more city which has better access from a tech point of view. And that is when they came to Telangana and chose Hyderabad to set up the centre. While the Centre of Excellence (CoE) will come up eventually in AI and Advanced Manufacturing, before that they plan to offer a six month programme called Foundation in AI and ML which will start in February. Their board has approved the decision and we will be signing the formal memorandum of understanding (MoU) soon,” said Jayesh Ranjan, principal secretary, IT Department, Telangana.

In addition to the institute, Telangana has become the first State to have been selected by national think tank Niti Aayog to roll out their programmes under their national policy on Artificial Intelligence. The State has signed an MoU in this regard about six months ago and will roll out the first batch of programmes soon.

Providing update on the CoE that Nasscom was planning to set up in Telangana, Ranjan said, “The CoE on Cyber Security has already started on a small scale and they are doing some programmes in association with T-Hub. The board of directors for CoE on AI and Data Sciences has been constituted and from February it will start operating”.