The Indian scientific community is an excited lot today and with good reason too. With the setting up of the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) in 2023 by an Act of the Parliament of India, the Centre’s aim is to catalyse research and innovation across India’s universities, colleges, research labs and more. One primary way the foundation intends to do so is via collaborations with industry, academia, government departments, and independent labs. It was no surprise then that the CEO of ANRF, Dr. Shivkumar Kalyanram visited the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad – an institute known for its emphasis on research, especially the applied kind – recently to better understand the myriad ways in which it engages in research and how ANRF could partner with it.

Faculty Meet and Lab Tour
Dr. Kalyanram obtained a guided tour of all the research centres that are located on campus- the multidisciplinary (the Tech Innovation Hub – iHub Data, the Kohli Centre on Intelligent Systems (KCIS), the Smart City Research Centre, and others), the development centres such as the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Raj Reddy Centre for Technology and Society, the Centre for Digital Technologies in Healthcare, and Visvam AI – a Centre of Excellence on AI for the Global South. He also met and interacted with faculty across all the research centres to gain insights on how research could become more mainstream. 

In the context of ANRF, the academic institutes that make up the Telangana AI Research and Collaboration Network – IIITH, IIT Hyderabad, BITS Hyderabad, ISB, JNTU, NIT Warangal along with corporates such as Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and startups, hospitals and others held a round table conference to brainstorm on the possibilities and models in which the industry-academia and the government could collaborate for impactful solutions.   Three key areas were brainstormed upon, namely AI for agriculture, cancer screening across all types, and computational or AI drug discovery. 

UG Research Rocks
On the sidelines of his whirlwind visit to IIITH, Dr. Kalyanram remarked that he found admirable about the way an institution that’s top in the world in some of the key areas, especially the AI-related ones, was built. “I love its undergraduate research. More importantly the collaboration between undergraduate research and Dual Degree programs and how they overlap with the PhD programs,” he said. In the context of three professors from IIITH bagging the Prime Minister’s Early Career Research Grant which provides up to 60 lakhs to support research and innovation for a period of 3 years, Dr. Kalyanram also spoke about the other horizontal programs that ANRF runs across a broad range of institutions to improve research quality and capacity. “Under the PM’s Early Career Research Grant, we have awarded 700 grants in the country. Similarly, there are other programs such as PAIR (Partnerships for Accelerated Innovation and Research) and more that your faculty is welcome to apply for,” he said, adding, “We are going to have other areas on the anvil too which are currently in the vision phase. We have to figure out how to convert those into programs.”

Powering The Future
Emphasizing that human capital is the most important part of national capital, Dr. Kalyanram remarked that he noticed in many grant proposals, a huge chunk of the cost to be of the capital kind. “Huge machines, huge microscope and things like that tend to dominate the budget,” he noted. “But if you are primarily needing people resources, it tends to be more capital efficient. The second aspect is the way you organise and collaborate with talent which leads to effectiveness.”