IIT Madras Launches Startup To Train Students In AI, At Affordable Costs

Faculty of the Indian Institute of Technology - Madras (IIT-M) have launched a startup which aims to prepare the workforce in India for the dawn of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) age by training students at affordable costs, India Today reports.

The startup, One-Fourth Labs, includes an online school known as ‘PadhAI’, which will offer India-specific courses in AI at nominal rates. Students with the top performance from the courses in PadhAI will receive invitations to an AI residency programme ‘Summer Garage’ at the IIT Research Park, every year.

Students will then work on researching and tackling social problems as well as find solutions of commercial value. Fourth Labs will further collaborate with small and medium enterprises in the industry to create various AI-driven applications, generating value for the economy in India.

Fourth Labs is founded by Dr Mitesh M Khapra and Dr Pratyush Kumar from the IIT-M’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering. The startup is incubated by the Incubation cell of IIT-M.

PadhAI is a hands-on course on ‘Deep Learning’. The startup offers minimal pre-requisites and low fees compared to other universities and private institutes. It is a four-month course with 80 hours of lecture content and will need equal time in solving assignments.

Both students and working professionals with a basic background in math and python can both register for the course at https://padhai.onefourthlabs.in until 24 January. Classes begin on 1 February. The fee for students and working professionals is Rs 1,000 and Rs 5,000 respectively.

The course will also have a capstone challenge and contests every month that will train participants to make an application which will work like Google Lens for various Indian languages.