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Ganesh Ramakrishnan
Professor of Disruption

Ganesh Ramakrishnan

Lead BharatGen, Chair Professor, Dept of CSE, IITB, Co-founder bbsAI

Ganesh Ramakrishnan
Pabitra Moharana·Published Updated

Key takeaways

  • Lead BharatGen, the world's first government-funded generative AI initiative, focusing on India's unique needs.
  • Develop advanced AI models using multilingual and multimodal foundations tailored to Indian datasets.
  • Co-founded bbsAI to address challenges with limited Indic data through open-source resources.
  • Focus on data-efficient machine learning and AI applications across various domains.
  • Contributed to national AI projects, including BharatGPT for India-centric multimodal AI solutions.
5 min

Ganesh Ramakrishnan is a distinguished professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. With a career spanning over two decades, he has made significant contributions to the fields of AI, machine learning, and natural language processing.

He is currently leading the BharatGen initiative, which is the world's first government-funded Generative AI initiative. BharatGen stands out with four key features: its multilingual and multimodal foundation models, the use of datasets specific to India for model building and training, its open-source platform, and the creation of an ecosystem for generative AI research across the nation.

Ramakrishnan's research focuses on data-efficient machine learning, information extraction, and AI applications in various domains. 

He has led numerous projects of national importance, including the development of AI-powered solutions for key business verticals and the BharatGPT consortium, which aims to create India-centric multimodal and multi-lingual AI models.

In addition to his work on BharatGPT, the professor has focused extensively on developing translation engines. To further this mission, he has co-founded bbsAI– a venture that has been a decade in the making and has resulted from impactful open source resources lead by him such as the Project Udaan and Decile.

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