Building a Research University:  A Case Study of IIIT-Hyderabad

Rajeev Sangal
Director
International Institute of Information Technology
Hyderabad, India
sangal@iiit.ac.in

 

International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H) is a newly setup university, about a decade old.  It is already recognized as a major research university in India.  This paper tries to describe its distinctive feature that have made it possible. They can be put in three categories:  Emphasis on research, application of research to societal and industrial needs, and incorporation of Humanities and Social Sciences.


1.  Emphasis on Research

IIIT-H has placed a great emphasis on doing research and building the research culture. This has been done at all levels including the undergraduate students  and not  just at the level of post-graduate students and faculty. In fact, an atmosphere of research permeates the Institute. Several things have been done to make it happen as described below.

 

    1. 1.1A Cluster of Research Centers not Departments 

 

IIIT-H is organized as research centers and research labs (RC/RL), to facilitate interdisciplinary research. It does not have departments, as they draw disciplinary and organizational boundaries in the minds of faculty and students.

 

    1. 1.2Research Opportunity at Undergraduate Level 

 

Students, even at the undergraduate level, get to participate in ongoing research and technology development - an opportunity unprecedented in India [1] [2]. This has helped develop critical mass and critical continuity in the research groups. After experiencing the joys of research, many undergraduate students go on to join the Masters or PhD program to continue research, many of them at IIIT-H itself. This is an indicator of the environment of research at IIIT-H.  

 

While all UG students get exposed to research, as many as 30% of them get enrolled in intensive research by opting for BTech (Honours). Many of these UG students go for higher study, either immediately or after 2-3 years of graduation.

 

1.3 Relating Core-IT to Domains

Research is taken up not only in the core areas of IT, namely Computer Sciences & Engineering (CSE) and Electronics & Communications (ECE), but also in relating IT to other domains. The following domains are being pursued currently: Structural Engineering, Earthquake Engineering, Spatial Informatics, Computational Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Computational Natural Sciences, Bioinformatics, Power Systems, Humanities and Social Sciences, etc.  (See appendix for a list.)

Besides the Masters and PhD programs, new trans-disciplinary academic programs have been started which combine core-IT with the domain areas. These are the 5-year integrated programs leading to BTech in CS and MS by Research in the domains of Sciences, Linguistics, and Humanities, respectively. These are intended to create a new synthesis between IT and the domains.

 

1.4 Research Achievements

All these have enabled IIIT-H to evolve into one of the largest academic research institutes in India.  There are about a dozen RCs/RLs in CSE and ECE, and another dozen in the domains. About 100 PhD students, and 250 MS by Research students are enrolled in the Institute.  See the appendix for some more details.

IIIT-H has won the best-in-the world prizes in contests.  For example, IIIT-H’s team won the first prize at the finals of CanSat 2010, an international aerospace competition held at Abilene, Texas, USA.  IIIT-H has won the overall first prize at Intel India Embedded Challenge 2011, out of 1,600 contestants from across India for its entry on a low cost, solar powered crop harvesting robot.  IIIT-H has been the winner of unsupervised word sense disambiguation in SemEval-2010 contest at International Conference of Association of Computational Linguistics held at Uppsala University.  In an uncommon achievement for an Indian University, two teams from IIIT-H were placed among the top four teams in India for participating in the 35th Annual ACM ICPC World Programming Finals.  IIIT-H was the world winner of the prestigious DUC research contest in Automatic Summarization organized by NIST, USA in 2006 and 2007. It has been the winner of more than a dozen other national or Asian prizes and contests.

 

2. Applications of Research

2.1 Research Applied to Industry and Society

The goal of research at IIIT-H is not just to publish papers; but, more importantly, to impact industry and society by developing new technologies.  Presence of research groups with critical mass and critical continuity makes it possible to take the suitable research at the Institute and convert it into field prototypes or technologies. This involves work on solving the, so called, last mile problems as well.

2.2 Incubation and Entrepreneurship

With institutional support for incubation being made available for budding entrepreneurs, several companies have been incubated based on the intellectual property (IP) developed at IIIT-H.

 

2.3 Technology Achievements

IIIT-H has developed several technologies with industrial and social impact. Many of them have been transferred to industry either to existing companies or to newly incubated companies. Some examples are given below.

Technology which allows images from flying aircraft to be combined (mosaiced) has been developed and transferred to a user agency. So also, the technology for text to speech on hand held devices (including cell phones) has been transferred to device manufacturers. Technology has also been developed to assist the doctors in rapid detection of retinal degradation based on processing of retinal images.

A major incubated company based on NLP and search technology developed at IIIT-H is providing search capability in 30 human languages, half of which are spoken in Europe and Arab speaking countries. Another one is based on speech synthesis technology, etc.

E-Sagu, a technology with social impact, allows farm advice to be given to farmers using IT. It was developed and demonstrated over 1000 farms running in several districts of AP for several years.

Machine translation technology developed by IIIT-H led consortium (and funded by Ministry of IT) has been deployed for use over the internet. This covers 4 language pairs providing automatic translation among Indian languages. 12 more pairs are expected to be released in stages [3].

 

3 Humanities and Social Sciences

3.1 HSS in Education

Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) are an important part of education. They provide breadth of vision including awareness about one’s surroundings. At IIIT-H, HSS constitutes about 15% of the required curricular credits at the undergraduate level.

In order to develop a humanistic outlook, and character among students, IIIT-H runs a unique human values program. It is a part of the essential curriculum at the undergraduate level. Its principles have also been adopted in running the institution and dealing with issues [4].

Special courses on Human Values are also run for other institutions, who send their faculty for training to this unique program.

3.2 Research Related to HSS

With a view to enable focused research on fundamental issues related to human beings and human society, IIIT-H has set up a new research center - Centre for Exact Humanities (CEH). It utilizes the power of IT in areas such as ontology, naatya shastra and multi-agent modeling of social systems.

3.3 Achievements

The result of running Human Values program is that the atmosphere at IIIT-H has undergone a slow but sweeping change. This is being increasingly noticed by people and visitors at the Institute. It has developed deeper relationships among students, students and faculty, and a change in view towards culture, ragging, wastage of water and electricity, etc.

The program was also recognized by the President of India, in his address to the nation on the eve of independence day 2006. Since then it has grown from strength to strength.

 

4. Summary

Set up under the Not-for-profit Public Private Partnership (N-PPP) model, IIIT-H raises all of its operational expenditure, and has been doing so right from its inception.

Most importantly an atmosphere of empowerment and mutual support has grown at IIIT-H. This is seen as freedom with responsibility. At the student level, there is a feeling that IIIT-H is an extended family. This is the result of running the Human Values program and developing an institutional culture according to it.

 

Appendix:  Research Centres at IIIT Hyderabad

 

References:

 

[1] Sangal, Rajeev, A Research-Oriented Undergraduate Curriculum in Computer Science,  CSI Communications,  Computer Society of India,  January 2008  (Report no: IIIT/TR/2008/174)


[2] Sangal, Rajeev, A Research Oriented Undergraduate Curriculum:  Design Principles and Concrete Realization, 2011 (http://ltrc.iiit.ac.in/showfile.php?filename=downloads/research-orientation-principles/index.html )


[3] Sampark Machine Translation System (http://sampark.org.in)


[4]Ramancharla Pradeep Kumar, Rajeev Sangal, Abhijit Mitra, Navjyoti Singh, Kamalakar Karlapalem, An Experiment on Introducing Human Values Course in Undergraduate Curriculum of Engineering Education, In Proceedings of Northeast American Society of Engineering Education Conference, 2009 (Report no: IIIT/TR/2009/75)


[5] Research Centres, IIIT-Hyderabad, India (http://www.iiit.ac.in/research/centers)

 

September 2011