10 IIIT-H Projects Get Centre’s Research Funding

Hyderabad: Ten research projects from the International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT-H) have secured advanced research grants from the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), one of India’s major funding programmes for high impact scientific research.

The projects were selected from about 15,700 proposals submitted from across the country. The work covers a wide range of emerging technologies, from artificial intelligence and robotics to quantum computing, speech technology and medical research.

Lalitha Vadlamani’s project on quantum error correction studies ways to protect fragile quantum bits so future quantum computers can function reliably. “Without error correction, a quantum computer cannot work reliably,” she said, noting that even small disturbances can disrupt quantum information.

Another project led by Girish Varma with Antony Thomas focuses on helping robots quickly judge whether an action is physically possible in cluttered environments. Their system, called Learned Estimation of Action Plausibility (LEAP), can decide much faster than traditional planning methods. Early tests show it works up to 44 times faster while maintaining more than 91 per cent accuracy.

Chiranjeevi Yarra, along with Parameswari Krishnamurthy and Rajakrishnan, is studying how machines can produce more natural sounding speech. The project examines prosody, the rhythm, tone and pitch that make human speech expressive. “Machines today can speak, but they lack natural delivery,” Yarra said.

Other funded projects span several specialised areas. Arti Yardi and Prasad Krishnan are studying how unknown communication codes can be identified and decoded from noisy signals, which has applications in secure communications. Atul Singh Arora, with Uttam Singh and Venkata Koppula of IIT Delhi, is developing methods to verify whether remote quantum computers are functioning correctly.

Anil Kumar Vuppula is working on speech recognition systems that can understand trilingual speech in Hindi, English and Telugu in real world settings such as hospitals and classrooms.

Vineet Gandhi is developing multimodal speech technologies that can help people with speech impairments communicate more clearly. A collaborative project by Shruti Upadhyaya of IIT Hyderabad and Kuldeep Kurte of IIIT-H is studying hourly rainfall patterns across India using satellite data, ground observations and artificial intelligence.

Deva Priyakumar and Vinod P.K. are using AI and physics based simulations to design drug candidates targeting a protein linked to aggressive cancers. Ashutosh Modi of IIT Kanpur, and C.V. Jawahar are building large datasets and artificial intelligence tools to understand and translate Indian Sign Language.