Indian academia has earned a proud moment on the global stage. Mitesh Khapra, Associate Professor at IIT Madras, has been featured in TIME Magazine’s 2025 list of the 100 most influential people in AI.
Unlike many who head billion-dollar companies, Khapra represents the impact of research and open science. His pioneering work is in natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and the development of AI systems capable of understanding Indian languages — an area that mainstream global models have long neglected.
Who is Mitesh Khapra?
Source: cse.iitm.ac.in
Mitesh M. Khapra is an Associate Professor working in the Department of Data Science and AI at the Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI at IIT Madras. He also heads the AI4Bharat Research Lab, dedicated to building tools, models, and applications for Indian languages in AI.
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What is the educational qualification of Mitesh Khapra?
Khapra completed both his M.Tech. and Ph.D. from IIT Bombay. He then worked as a scientist at IBM Research India before moving into academia. Over the years, his contributions have earned him prestigious honours such as the IBM PhD Fellowship, the Microsoft Rising Star Award, and the Google Faculty Research Award (2018).
What are the research contributions of Mitesh Khapra?
Khapra’s research centres on bridging the gap between AI technologies for English and Indian languages. He emphasises open-source development, creating tools, datasets, neural models, and reference applications for public use. His interests include multilingual pretrained models, speech recognition, neural machine translation, and evaluation metrics for natural language generation. Much of this work is carried out at the AI4Bharat Lab at IIT Madras, which he leads under the Nilekani Centre.
What Professional Profile does Mitesh Khapra have?
Currently, Mitesh Khapra is serving as an Associate Professor in the Department of Data Science and AI, Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI at IIT Madras. Lately, his research has been featured in the top conferences and journals such as ACL, NeurIPS, AAAI, EMNLP, and TACL. Also, he has played leadership roles as Area Chair or Senior PC Member at premier AI conferences like ICLR and AAAI.
Before joining IIT Madras, he spent over four years at IBM Research India, working on machine translation, cross-language learning, multimodal learning, and deep learning applications.
What is AI4Bharat?
Source: ai4bharat.iitm.ac.in
AI4Bharat is an open-source initiative that was established in 2019 by Mitesh Khapra and his team at IIT Madras. This initiative is dedicated to making advancements in artificial intelligence for Indian languages.
The platform develops datasets, language models, and digital tools that make it easier for researchers, startups, and innovators to create AI solutions suited to India’s vast linguistic diversity.
The reason Indian language technology is behind English is that we do not have enough data for Indian languages,” he says.
AI4Bharat becomes an official partner for the Indian Government’s Bhashini program, which uses AI to assist citizens in accessing digital services in their own languages.
As per Time AI 100 2025, “Khapra’s research lab AI4Bharat led a project that took researchers to almost 500 of India’s 700 districts, recording thousands of hours of voices from people with diverse educational and socioeconomic backgrounds to capture all 22 of India’s official languages.”
Mitesh Khapra said,”15 years back, an average PhD student in India working on language technology would end up working on English problems,” but adds that “with these datasets available, I see a shift: now Indian students are working on Indian problems.”
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What are the Awards and Recognition of Mitesh Khapra
- Srimathi Marti Annapurna Gurunath Award for Excellence in Teaching (2022)
- Nasscom AI Game Changer Award (2021, for Team Samanantar)
- Prof. B. Yegnanarayana Award for Excellence in Research and Teaching (2020)
- IITM Young Faculty Recognition Award (2019)
- Google Faculty Research Award (2018)
- Microsoft Rising Star Award (2011)
- IBM PhD Fellowship (2011-2012)
What are the teaching contributions of Mitesh Khapra?
- Khapra has taught a wide range of courses at IIT Madras, including:
- Deep Learning (CS7015/CS6910) – Multiple sessions between 2017 and 2023
- Topics in Deep Learning (CS7016) – 2017, 2019
- Computational Engineering (CS1100) – 2018
- Object-Oriented Algorithms Implementation and Analysis Lab (CS2810) – 2019
- Linear Algebra and Random Processes (CS6015) – 2020, 2021, 2022
Conclusion
Mitesh Khapra, an Associate Professor at IIT Madras, is included in TIME Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in AI. His AI4Bharat initiative is an advanced Artificial Intelligence platform developed to make it easy for researchers, startups, and innovators to create AI solutions suited to India’s vast linguistic diversity. From his work in advanced AI, India will boost in the Artificial Intelligence sector at the worldwide level.
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