For undergraduate and postgraduate students, the Indian Institute of Technology-Guwahati will establish a School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. In the academic year 2021-22, the first batch of B Tech students for this school will be admitted based on their JEE scores. In this regard, IIT-Guwahati and the Mehta Family Foundation (MFF) of the United States signed a Memorandum of Understanding today.
Prof TG Sitharam, Director, IIT Guwahati, and Rahul Mehta, Chief Executive Officer, Mehta Family Foundation, USA, practically signed the MoU. “The explosion of data in all fields of information continues unabated,” Rahul Mehta said. Data science and artificial intelligence, like computer science, have the potential to change the world.
These areas can influence educational and research approaches across the continuum of human understanding. As imagined in this new school, global interdisciplinary partnerships would improve our understanding of society and nature. Professor Shankar Subramaniam, Professor Rajesh Gupta (both University of California, San Diego), and Professor Ananth Grama (Purdue University) are among the international experts who have been brought together.
The school will also have access to eminent professors from top US universities who will donate their time and resources to the school's academic and research endeavours. The curriculum has been designed to provide a solid theoretical base as well as focus on different interdisciplinary application areas, according to Prof R Bhattacharjee, head, Mehta Family School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, IIT Guwahati. One of the school's goals is to engage in targeted multi-year interdisciplinary research projects and address problems that arise.