India’s Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have long been renowned for producing world-class talent in science, technology, and engineering. In recent years, several IIT alumni have emerged as key players in the global artificial intelligence (AI) landscape, leveraging their expertise to revolutionise industries and foster innovation. This article highlights five notable IIT alumni whose contributions are shaping the future of AI.
Background: Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet Inc. and Google is one of the renowned engineering alumni of IIT Kharagpur who did his metallurgical engineering. Education gave him the analytical capabilities he needed by the time he graduated from a university to perform well in leadership positions specialising in technology.
Impact: Since Sundar Pichai took over as the lead, Google has risen to the top in terms of conducting and applying AI research. These are Google Assistant, an Artificial Intelligence green initialism virtual assistant that brings improvement to use experience by voice recognition and natural language processing. Another big contribution is TensorFlow, which is an AI framework utilized by the developers and researchers with a purpose to develop the ML models. Pichai’s responsible approach to AI states that the technologies developed by Google are fair, respect privacy issues, and are accessible, among other aspects affects how Augmented intelligence as a societal entity is present in everyday life.
Background: Vinod Khosla, IIT Delhi alumnus, co-founded Sun Microsystems and later Khosla Ventures, a reputable venture capital firm.
Impact: Vinod himself has been actively involved in AI through his venture capital firm known as Khosla Ventures and has invested in healthcare, clean technology and education. The firm’s equity backing goes to innovative firms in deploying deep learning to diagnose illnesses at an early stage or to optimize power usage. It should be noted that Khosla is building AI applications and contributes to technological advancement and the solution to global problems.
Background: Nandan Nilekani, an alumnus of IIT Bombay and co-founder of Infosys and also the former chairman of UIDAI.
Impact: Nilekani’s work at UIDAI exemplifies how AI can be harnessed for public benefit. The Aadhaar programme, which provides unique biometric identification to over a billion Indians, utilises AI for efficient identity verification and fraud prevention. Nilekani has also supported applying of AI in the financial services and creating an effective platform for an inclusion of the under banked persons. The contributions made by the author brought out the importance of AI in the improvement of public service delivery and reduction of social inequality.
Background: Raghuram Rajan is an economist and an ex Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, he studied Electrical Engineering at IIT Delhi before switching to economics.
Impact: While specializing in the field of finance, Raghuram Rajan applies AI and data analytics to his economic conclusions. He uses machine learning algorithms to explain economic phenomena and to estimate risks and behavior of markets. Rajan changes policymakers’ and global financial institutions’ discourse and practice through his thought leadership to show how AI can bring more meaning and better solutions to economics.
Even IIT alumni are at the helm of affairs which shows that education transformed and empowered minds can bring about change when backed by determined leadership. Their work includes the pace setting of emerging AI technologies in global tech leaders, ICT and their use of AI for the enhancement of social well being; all these are indicative of the versatile careers of IIT graduates.
Over time, these professionals create inspiring examples of how significant knowledge and creativity contribute to enhancing the potential of AI. This also reasserts IITs as institutions of excellence and also again establishes that technology has a paramount importance in addressing some challenges facing humanity.