IIT Madras’ AI research arm AI4Bharat has announced the hiring process for its AI resident (and associates) program for the year 2024-25. This year-long pre-doctoral program focuses on intensive work in NLP, speech, and vision projects. 

The program offers the opportunity to work closely with IIT Madras faculty and industry researchers on nationally significant research problems. Under the guidance of notable professors like Mitesh Khapra, Dr Anoop Kunchukuttan, and Dr Pratyush Kumar, AI4Bharat has a strong history of residents conducting cutting-edge research and publishing in renowned venues such as ACL, Interspeech, ICASSP, EMNLP, TMLR, and more. 

Collaborating with AI4Bharat researchers, residents have contributed to impactful open-source datasets and models like Samanantar, BPCC, IndicTrans1 and 2, IndicWav2Vec, IndicBart, IndicNLG Benchmark, widely adopted in government and industry.

The ideal candidate should be a recent graduate with a bachelor’s degree in computer science or related fields from 2022 onwards and should have excellent programming skills demonstrated through independent projects on platforms like GitHub or Kaggle, with participation in competitive programming considered advantageous. 

A solid understanding of deep learning fundamentals, obtained through online courses with formal certification or as part of the B.Tech curriculum, is also required. Candidates should also have experience in training and evaluating large deep learning models, particularly on Transformer-based models for NLP such as BERT, mT5, mBART, wav2vec, and more. 

However, an important point to note is that applications are only accepted from individuals willing to relocate to Chennai, except in exceptional circumstances.

The research lab recently launched Chitralekha, an open-source AI-powered video transcreation platform created in collaboration with EkStep. This platform incorporates a comprehensive workforce management system, facilitating end-to-end transcreation of videos from one language to another. It supports English and several Indian languages, offering transcription in 12 languages, translation in all 22 official languages, and automated voice-over in 14 languages. 

Register for the program here.