UPES Announces New Centre of Excellence for AI; Plans to Invest INR 50 Crores to Support Cutting-Edge Research

Dehradun-based leading private multidisciplinary university, UPES is setting up a world-class Center of Excellence for AI at its campus. This pioneering initiative will allow students, faculty and researchers to develop bleeding-edge technologies, and work on real-life challenges and industry pain points.

Reiterating its commitment to research and innovation, the future-focused university has invested significantly in setting up a state-of-the-art Center of Excellence in AI and Data Sciences, which will focus on multi-disciplinary research, consulting, and training. The Center will be equipped with a cluster of high-end servers, GPUs and TPUs (Transaction Processing Units). It will provide top-class infrastructure for over 50 researchers to work simultaneously.

Along with facilitating cutting-edge research, the Center of Excellence will also offer interdisciplinary master’s and research levels programs in Data Sciences and AI. Furthermore, it will also foster the application of these technologies in verticals like BFSI, Healthcare, Defense and Manufacturing. With its strong research orientation, the center aims to leverage in-house expertise and tap into its extensive corpus of knowledge for consulting services, continuous education, and management development programs in these domains.

“In the recent past, especially with the availability of high-end hardware, AI has evolved into one of the most impactful technologies with huge implications in multiple sectors that contribute to the global economy. Through this Center of Excellence, we aim to contribute to not only fundamental research in AI and related fields, but also work on their application, provide hands-on experience to students, and collaborate with governments and industry. We want to contribute significantly to the body of knowledge in AI, and evangelize its adoption in academia, government and industry,” said Dr. Ravi S Iyer, Dean, School of Computer Science, UPES.

As per a recently published report by McKinsey, Generative AI’s impact on productivity could add trillions of dollars in value to the global economy. The report also estimates that half of today’s work activities could be automated between 2030 and 2060, with a midpoint in 2045.  Despite having a high penetration of AI talent, India trails behind several leading global tech hubs in the race for Generative AI. Therefore, it is crucial to invest in and equip innovators with the essential skills needed to excel in the industry.