Mindtree, a technology services and digital transformation company, announced on Wednesday that they had created an endowment focused on artificial intelligence research with the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore (IISc). This partnership is aimed at facilitating teaching and research for AI in both data sciences and Natural Language Processing (NLP). A statement published by Mindtree added that this endowment was to introduce IISc students to solving modern business problems using AI and machine learning, leading to developing high-impact solutions at scale.

Named the Mindtree Associate Professor Chair on Artificial Intelligence, the endowment fund is designed to attract dynamic faculty who are 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 visualisation, computational topology, and computational geometry. The main topics of research include topological methods for visualisation; multiscale representation of large-scale scientific data; geometric and topological simplification; and applications of visualisation in life sciences, climate science, and material science. Prof Natarajan’s research is set to impact next-generation data processing, analysis and visualisation technology in the large.

“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.”

Commenting on the association, Rostow Ravanan, CEO and Managing Director of Mindtree said, “Artificial intelligence, which is 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 with an avenue to interact with some of the best minds working in this segment.”