GaneshRamakrishnan

Ganesh Ramakrishnan is Founding Director of BharatGen, India's first government-backed, open-source, multilingual foundation model initiative launched in October 2024, spanning text, speech, and document vision models across 22+ Indic languages. His research in natural language processing, generative AI, and human-assisted machine learning defines BharatGen's approach: building large language models on small, carefully curated datasets to make high-quality AI viable in low-resource settings.

After earning his PhD from IIT Bombay in 2004, he joined IBM Research India, working on scalable information extraction, before returning as faculty in 2009. He led research in statistical relational learning and machine translation, producing Udaan, an end-to-end machine translation ecosystem for Indian languages, and DECILE, a data-efficient machine learning framework for resource-constrained environments. He has collaborated extensively with IBM Research, Adobe, and Google, and his work has appeared in AAAI, ACL, NeurIPS, ICML, and EMNLP; he serves as area chair for AAAI and ACL.

Beyond research, he is Institute Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, holds the Bank of Baroda Chair Professorship in Digital Entrepreneurship, and heads the Koita Centre for Digital Health at IIT Bombay. He has been globally recognised as one of the five Goalkeeper Champions by the Gates Foundation (2026), and featured among AIM 100 Most Influential Global AI Leaders (2026 and 2024), MIT Sloan India's AI50 (2026), and Forbes India's Top 30 AI Minds (2025). He is also a recipient of the Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam HPC & AI Award (2026) and the National Gold Award for eGovernance (2022).