Chandra tells students to pursue social entrepreneurship

Chandrasekaran inaugurated FC Kohli Research Block, part of Kohli Center on Intelligent Systems

Tata Sons Chairman-designate N Chandrasekaran on Monday stressed on the need to focus on social entrepreneurship programmes and suggested students to do a number of social projects, synthesising the real problems using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

He was here to inaugurate FC Kohli Research Block on Monday. The block is a part of Kohli Center on Intelligent Systems (KCIS) at International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT)-Hyderabad which was funded by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Foundation to give a fillip to research, teaching and entrepreneurship in the area of intelligent systems.

Addressing the students, Chandrasekaran said that the centre coordinated research among several active research areas, including artificial intelligence, natural language processing, information retrieval, machine learning, cognitive science, robotics, data sciences, data analytics and other relevant groups within the country and abroad. 

He further said, “The centre will provide an impetus to advancements in information technology and associated systems. It will bring academics, students, researchers and professionals together with infrastructure conducive to sophisticated research in intelligent systems. It reinforces our long-standing commitment to education and research in cutting-edge technologies.”

Artificial intelligence has become a tool to augment the human reasoning capacity and has made a big impact on different human endeavours, said Raj Reddy, chairman of the Governing Council of IIIT-Hyderabad, at the event. 

“We can find intelligent systems and solutions to address the critical problems of the society such as poverty and hunger.” 

The KCIS acts as an umbrella organisation to strengthen the existing groups and facilitate new activities in related areas. The research centre is likely to attract projects and funding from other entities in the government and industry sectors of the country. It had a special focus on entrepreneurship promotion in the intelligent systems area.