Our Research Centres
The Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI is home to several world-class research centres, each established as a forerunner in various key areas of AI and data science. These centres bring together interdisciplinary teams to tackle complex real-world challenges and advance the frontiers of knowledge.
AI4Bharat
AI4Bharat is a research lab at IIT Madras which works on developing open-source datasets, tools, models and applications for Indian languages. Over the past few years, the lab has done cutting-edge work in Indian language technology, which has been published in top conferences around the world. Some of the top contributions from the lab are IndicCorp, BPCC, Shrutilipi, Kathbath, IndicBERT, IndicTrans, IndicXlit, IndicWav2Vec, IndicWhishper, and TTS.
AlphaGrep Quantitative Research Lab
The AlphaGrep Quantitative Research Lab at IIT Madras is a pioneering research initiative established with CSR funding of Rs. 5.65 crore from AlphaGrep Securities, a leading quantitative trading and investment firm. The lab conducts cutting-edge research at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and quantitative finance, focusing on financial markets and microstructure analysis, quantitative investment management, and quantitative risk management.
Led by distinguished faculty members from the Department of Data Science and AI – Professor Nandan Sudarsanam, Dr. Nirav Bhatt, Dr. Chandrashekar Lakshminarayanan and Dr. Arun Ayyar (Adjunct Faculty) – the lab represents a significant step forward in financial technology research. Under the guidance of Professor B. Ravindran, Head of the Wadhwani School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, the facility aims to advance the understanding and responsible adoption of AI in quantitative models, recognizing the quant community's pioneering role in embracing new technologies.
CeRAI
Centre for Responsible AI
The Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI) is an interdisciplinary research centre at IIT Madras. The centre is a premier research centre for both fundamental and applied research in Responsible AI with immediate impact in deploying AI systems in the Indian ecosystem. The centre pursues research in the domains of Ethical and Responsible AI and is fast becoming the standard body in the country to recommend guidelines and policies to make deployable AI models/systems more accountable, explainable and responsible.
IBSE
Centre for Integrative Biology and Systems Medicine
The Centre for Integrative Biology and Systems Medicine (IBSE), IIT Madras, is a Centre of Excellence at IIT Madras under the IoE program in areas of AI/ML in the analysis of biological and clinical data. IBSE is an interdisciplinary group dedicated to pioneering innovative approaches and algorithms that integrate multi-dimensional data across scales to understand, predict, and manipulate complex biological systems. By doing so, our goal is to advance the fundamental understanding of cells and their interactions as populations that collectively form intricate organs, thus facilitating the advancement of personalised medicine.
RBCDSAI
The Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and AI
The Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and AI (RBCDSAI) was set up in 2017 and is the pre-eminent interdisciplinary research centre for Data Science and AI in India, with very active collaborations in manufacturing analytics, smart cities and healthcare. We have one of the country's largest network analytics and deep reinforcement learning groups. We also have one of the most active natural language processing and deep learning groups. We have published over 220 articles in top conferences and journals and received numerous best-paper recognitions.
The Mint
Mobility Infrastructure and Innovation
MInT is a global initiative to build mobility digital infrastructure, an R&D portfolio and a skilled workforce to develop breakthrough mobility solutions to realize Sustainable Development Goals. The MInT collaborative is based on the principle of 'collaborate and compete' as we bring industry competitors, government agencies and academic innovators to the same table and co-create the mobility digital infrastructure (Bharat Multi-Modal Mobility Stack, BM³S) to enable holistic system solutions.
Walmart Centre for Tech Excellence
The Walmart Centre for Tech Excellence at IIT Madras, established through a partnership between IIT Madras and Walmart Global Tech, is dedicated to empowering Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) through technological advancement. Led by Prof. Raghunathan Rengaswamy, the Centre focuses on developing cutting-edge solutions that enable MSMEs to adopt Artificial Intelligence and IoT technologies, driving operational efficiency and profitability. With an initial focus on supporting 15-20 MSMEs over the next three years, the Centre aims to guide businesses in leveraging technology to boost growth while meeting Sustainable Development Goals. This initiative represents a significant step toward digitizing and modernizing India's MSME sector through the combined expertise of IIT Madras and Walmart's global technology capabilities.