Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan1 is currently serving as Bank of Baroda Chair Professor in Digital Entrepreneurship at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Bombay. He completed his BTech and PhD both from the Department if CSE, IIT Bombay. His current areas of research include Large Language Models and Generative AI, human-assisted AI/ML, use of AI/ML in resource-constrained environments, learning with symbolic encoding of domain knowledge in ML and NLP, etc. His research has been featured in top conferences such as AAAI, ACL, NeurIPS and EMNLP, and he has served as the area chair for major conferences such as AAAI and ACL. Recently, Forbes India and Accel recognized Ganesh amongst the Top 30 Indian Minds in Artificial Intelligence ( AI) globally across researchers, entrepreneurs, policy leaders, academics, and innovators who are shaping the future of AI2.
Ganesh has also been recognized amongst the top 100 most Influential Global Leaders in AI by Analytics India Magazine. As AI reshapes our world Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan has been leading the Large Language Modeling initiatives for India at BharatGen funded by NM-ICPS, Department of Science and Technology, as well as several Industrial collaborations such as IBM Research, Adobe and Google. For a long time, he has been focusing his energy on organizing relevant machine learning modules for resource-constrained environments into decile.org. He has demonstrated the impact of such data-efficient machine learning in applications such as Video Analytics3, an end-to-end machine translation eco-system4 and OCR5 that are all used extensively, as well as in works in the making such as multi-modal analytics6. He has received the prestigious National Gold Award for eGovernance (Gold Award) in 2022, the Dr P.K. Patwardhan Award for Technology Development 2020 as well as an IIT Bombay Impactful Research Awards in both 2024 and in 2017. He has also received awards such as the IBM Faculty Award, Amazon Research Award, and awards from Google Research, Qualcomm, Adobe, Microsoft, etc. He also held the Institute Chair Professorship between 2021 and until 2024, J.R. Isaac Chair at IIT Bombay between 2014 and 2016. Ganesh is very passionate about boosting the AI research eco-system for India and toward that, the research by him and his students as well as collaborators has resulted in startups that he has either jointly founded, has transferred technology to, or is mentoring. Ganesh has also served as the founding head of the Koita Centre for Digital Health at IIT Bombay7 , the first of its kind in India. Owing to his leadership at the National Disease Modeling Consortium, he has been selected to be a disease and economic modeling expert member of Standing Technical Sub Committee (STSC) as well as an expert member of Standing Working Group – Immunization and Vaccine Research and Capacity Building (SWG-IVRCB) as part of NTAGI (National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization), Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Govt of India.
Notable Projects and Initiatives
Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan of IIT Bombay is spearheading several transformative AI projects that focus on multilingual, inclusive, and data-efficient technologies tailored for India’s diverse linguistic and socio-cultural landscape. Here are some of his most significant recent initiatives:
BharatGen↗
BharatGen is India’s first government-funded generative AI initiative aimed at developing multilingual and multimodal foundational models. Led by Prof. Ramakrishnan, this project is a collaborative effort involving premier institutions like IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIT Hyderabad, IIIT Hyderabad, IIM Indore, and IIT Mandi. The goal is to create AI models that understand and generate content in multiple Indian languages, addressing the country’s vast linguistic diversity8.
🚀 Proudly Powering Bharat’s AI Revolution! 🇮🇳🤖
Under the visionary leadership of Prof.Ganesh Ramakrishnan, IIT Bombay is playing a pivotal role in shaping India’s AI future. As part of this national effort, the institute has released 16 culturally grounded AI datasets on AIKOSHA9, the secure AI repository maintained by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India. These datasets aim to empower research, innovation, and development of inclusive, multilingual, and context-aware AI systems that reflect the richness and diversity of India.
✈️ Project Udaan
Project Udaan10 is an end-to-end translation ecosystem designed to bridge the language barrier in education by translating technical and academic content from English into Indian languages. The project includes an OCR engine that preserves the source document’s style and layout, a translation engine, and a user-friendly post-editing tool. The technology has been licensed to Bharat Bhasha Tech and has received recognition from various government officials.An ecosystem for data-efficient and scalable end-to-end document machine translation, which earned him the IRCC Impactful Research Award in 2023.
🧠 DECILE: Data-Efficient Machine Learning
DECILE (Data Efficient Learning)11 addresses the challenges of training state-of-the-art AI models with limited data. The project encompasses four key components:CORDS: COResets and Data Subset selection
- DISTIL: Deep dIverSified inTeractIve Learning
- SubmodLib: Summarizing massive datasets using submodular optimization
- SPEAR: Semi-suPErvised dAta progRamming
These tools aim to reduce the computational resources and labeled data required for training AI models without compromising accuracy.
🧑💼 bbsAI: AI Startup for Indic Languages↗
Co-founded by Prof. Ganesh and Ganesh Arnaal, bbsAI is an AI startup focused on developing translation engines and AI-powered solutions for Indian languages. The venture builds upon the work done in Project Udaan and aims to create small language models that can operate effectively in data-scarce environments. bbsAI has also developed a Hindi user interface for LibreOffice, named bbsहिन्दीoffice, and plans to extend this to other major Indian languages.
📹 Video Surveillance Analytics
Prof. Ramakrishnan has developed software for real-time and offline video surveillance analytics, which has been licensed to SrivisifAI. This technology is used for security and compliance applications, demonstrating practical AI applications in real-world scenarios12.
🧾 MeitY-Funded Research Projects Led by Prof. Ganesh
Prof. Ganesh is leading two projects funded by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY):
- OCRs and Applications in Indian Languages, and
An Interpretable Unified Framework for Text-to-Text Translation Among Indian Languages Using Sanskrit-Based Interlingua Representation.
📱 Corontine: Real-Time Contact Tracing Application
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Prof. Ramakrishnan developed Corontine, a real-time contact tracing application featuring geofenced tracking, tracing, and alerting capabilities. This application was part of IIT Bombay’s initiatives to mitigate the impact of the pandemic13.
🛒 Lokacart: Supporting MSMEs and Farmer Groups
Lokacart is a platform developed to assist Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) and farmer groups by facilitating the distribution of their products. The technology has been licensed to Strategic ERP and was part of IIT Bombay’s efforts to support communities during the COVID-19 crisis14.
Awards and Recognitions
- He honored with the recognition of being honored as one of the Top 30 Indian minds leading the AI revolution by forbesindia.com15.
- National Award for eGovernance (Gold Award)16. in 2022 for outstanding research on citizen-centric services, specifically for video analytics in security and compliance applications .
- Named among the AIM 100: Top 100 Most Influential Global Leaders in AI in 202417., recognizing his contributions to AI research and its applications in India .
- Project Udaan18.: An ecosystem for data-efficient and scalable end-to-end document machine translation, which earned him the IRCC Impactful Research Award in 2023. 19.
He has mentored numerous students, guiding research that bridges theoretical foundations with practical applications in AI and machine learning .
Prof. Ganesh work continues to influence the fields of AI and machine learning, particularly in developing solutions that address the unique challenges and opportunities within the Indian context.
