IP University to establish Indian Knowledge System Centre to align with ancient ‘guru-shishya parampara
Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University (GGSIPU) has announced the establishment of a new centre focused on reviving India's traditional educational values and knowledge heritage. Named the In-Situ Centre for Indian Knowledge System and Technology Innovation (CIKTSI), the initiative will be housed at the university's Dwarka campus, said an official statement of GGSIPU.
It aims to align closely with the ancient 'guru-shishya parampara' — a tradition rooted in experiential learning, mentorship and holistic development, the statement added.
GGSIPU Vice Chancellor Mahesh Verma emphasized the philosophical foundation of the centre.
'This initiative is rooted in the vision of blending India's ancient wisdom with modern education and research. It echoes the essence of the guru-shishya parampara, which has always emphasized mentorship, experiential learning and character formation,' he said.
The centre will initially be run in self-financed mode from the University School of Education under the leadership of its Dean Prof. Saroj Sharma, the statement said.
A multidisciplinary working committee, comprising the members from various academic schools of the university will guide the centre's integrated development, it added.
Prof. Sharma highlighted that the vision behind CIKTSI is deeply inspired by the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which advocates for the integration of Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) into mainstream education.
'The centre will foster collaboration across disciplines and promote innovation grounded in India's rich intellectual traditions,' she said.
The centre will serve as a hub for a wide range of activities, including curriculum development incorporating IKS, creation of new IKS-based courses, promotion of interdisciplinary research and innovation, skill and capacity building, entrepreneurship incubation, industry collaboration, digital preservation, community outreach and global academic partnerships.
According to the university, CIKTSI will also contribute towards cultural revival, sustainable development and strengthening of national identity by bridging traditional knowledge with contemporary applications.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Hindustan Times
5 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
Pune scientist leads global team helping ALS patients regain voice
PUNE A Pune-based scientist is front and centre of a major milestone in neurotechnology – an implant-based brain-computer interface (BCI) that enables an individual with advanced amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to speak in real time with natural intonation, and even sing. Pune-based scientist is part of neurotech project team that enables individual with advanced amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to speak in real time with natural intonation, and even sing. (HT) Dr Maitreyee Wairagkar – a former student of Jnana Prabodhini (Nigdi) and Fergusson College who completed her Engineering Masters and Ph.D. from the United Kingdom and is now based at UC Davis as 'project scientist' to lead the project since the last three years – has set an example of what Indian girls can achieve provided they get a chance. Dr Wairagkar – working with her team of researchers at UC Davis's Neuroprosthetics Laboratory since the last three years – has led the project from conception to design to execution and developed this 'first-in-world' technology that demonstrates a brain-to-voice neuroprosthesis capable of synthesising speech with less than a 25-millisecond delay, virtually indistinguishable from natural vocal feedback. Dr Wairagkar is the first author on the study published in the scientific journal, 'Nature' on June 12, 2025. Drawing on Dr Wairagkar's expertise, her team has developed algorithms to extract and denoise neural features, train phoneme and pitch decoders, and craft a full end-to-end voice synthesis system. Dr Wairagkar and team have enabled the decoding of fine-grained paralinguistic cues, allowing the user to express not just words but also emotion and melody. The system uses 256 microscale electrodes implanted in the ventral precentral gyrus, which is the part of the brain crucial for speech production. In the course of the study, as the participant attempted to speak, neural signals were decoded in real time into phonemes and paralinguistic features like pitch and emphasis and subsequently transformed into audible speech through a vocoder and speaker system. Importantly, the participant was not only able to communicate new words but also ask questions, shift intonation, and sing simple melodies in a major leap towards expressive, spontaneous communication. About the achievement, Dr Wairagkar said, 'What makes this technology extraordinary is not just that it translates brain activity into speech, but that it does so with the flow and character of natural voice. That expressiveness is what makes real conversation possible, and human.' Dr Wairagkar's contributions allowed the participant to control tone and stress in real time; a feature absent in earlier BCIs that often relied on slow, word-by-word output. Senior researchers at UC Davis, including Dr Sergey Stavisky and neurosurgeon Dr David Brandman, emphasised the emotional and practical impact of the work. 'This is the first time we have been able to restore a participant's own voice in real time, allowing him not only to talk but to sound like himself,' said Dr Stavisky. Dr Brandman—who implanted the arrays under the BrainGate2 clinical trial—highlighted the emotional power of restoring not just speech, but the participant's own voice. Test listeners recognised nearly 60% of the words correctly when BCI-driven voice was used (compared to just 4% intelligibility in natural, dysarthric speech), underscoring dramatic improvements in communication clarity. The neuroprosthesis not only decodes speech at the phoneme level but also captures prosody—how a sentence is said—making it the closest attempt yet at recreating natural, flowing conversation from thought alone. This milestone represents a profound shift in assistive communication for people living with ALS, brainstem strokes, or other forms of locked-in syndrome. It also puts India at the centre of a transformative global scientific collaboration through Dr Wairagkar's involvement. The researchers note that although the findings are promising, brain-to-voice neuroprostheses remain in an early phase. A key limitation is that the research was performed with a single participant with ALS. It will be crucial to replicate these results with more participants, including those who have speech loss from other causes such as stroke. As further trials progress and the technology is refined, experts believe this innovation could redefine how neurotechnology restores voice and identity for millions who are otherwise left voiceless.
Time of India
6 hours ago
- Time of India
Nasa spacecraft around the moon photographs the crash site of a Japanese company's lunar lander
This image provided by NASA shows an annotation indicating the impact site for ispace's Resilience lunar lander, seen by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (Picture credit: AP) CAPE CANAVERAL : A Nasa spacecraft around the moon has photographed the crash site of a Japanese company's lunar lander . Nasa released the pictures Friday, two weeks after ispace 's lander slammed into the moon. The images show a dark smudge where the lander, named Resilience, and its mini rover crashed into Mare Frigoris or Sea of Cold, a volcanic region in the moon's far north. A faint halo around the area was formed by the lunar dirt kicked up by the impact. Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the scene last week. The crash was the second failure in two years for Tokyo-based ispace. Company officials plan to hold a news conference next week to explain what doomed the latest mission, launched from Cape Canaveral in January.
Mint
9 hours ago
- Mint
India is missing the core elements needed to realise the AI dream
New Delhi: India's mushrooming artificial intelligence-focused startups are attracting a lot of buzz, but a lack of innovation and groundbreaking research means the country is way behind the US and China in the tussle for AI supremacy. This is a result of what the industry calls 'secondary' innovation—technologies that cannot be patented globally to influence global economics in the long run. Spending on foundational engineering, research and development (ER&D) work in AI is minuscule, at least five executives involved in AI-related work told Mint. In November, the World Intellectual Property Organization (Wipo's) annual report said that India was the sixth region in the world in terms of overall patent applications—behind China, the US, Japan, Korea and the European Union. However, the gap was stark—China filed 1.7 million patents through 2024, almost 3x more than the US, with 600,000 patents. India filed only 90,000 patents—5% of what China did. Also read: AI firms getting GPU sops may see govt at the table The gap is even more evident in generative AI, the core battlefield in global technology right now. Last year, China filed over 38,000 patents in generative AI with Wipo, the global patent authority, ahead of the US with around 6,500 patents. India ranked sixth here too with 1,350 patents in generative AI—3.5% of China's advancements, and around a fifth of the US. Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union minister for electronics and IT, promised last month that 'India's first foundational AI model is still on track to be released by the end of this year". Yet, the patent filings suggest a US-China war for AI supremacy threatens to leave India out of the league of nations that would influence global innovation and economy over the next decades. Fund scarcity Founders argue that much of this is due to the lack of large early-stage funds. US-based Essential AI, founded by Ashish Vaswani, the former Google Brain engineer who co-invented the transformer model that backs all generative AI applications, emerged from stealth in December 2023 with a $56.5-million series-A funding round. Others that have raised large capital in the US over the past three years include Adept AI's $65-million Series A funding round in April 2022, Cursor's $60-million Series A in August and more. Each of these ventures is currently investing in building foundational technologies that, in the long run, would be patented and licensed to run AI applications and services around the world. Also read: Sovereign silicon: India targets indigenous 2nm, Nvidia-level GPU by 2030 Executives leading global ventures agree that India is behind the curve in AI at the moment. There is 'definitely a lack of enough AI engineers working on core engineering in the field in India", said Pranav Mistry, founder and chief executive Mistry, former global chief of Samsung's advanced research division, spoke withMinton the sidelines of a gathering in Bengaluru earlier this month. 'There is certainly a mindset difference between India and the US in terms of how ventures approach AI engineering in the two nations. In the end, being able to hold patents is what will give geographies access to geopolitical soft power over the years to come—and India should definitely focus on this field," Mistry said. Vaswani of Essential AI said, 'There's no reason for India to not build its own AI models—and there should be more ventures focused on doing it in and for India, within India." Developing vision Investors argue that a lack of vision for the long run from founders is a key part of why core ER&D work is not being found among India's AI startups. 'Any entity pitching for undertaking foundational AI engineering comes with a five-year road map, which is the equivalent of multiple decades in the modern-day AI world. It is absolutely true that India is still working on building on top of the engineering that US and other entities are undertaking—and work that could be licensed globally and impact industries holistically are still at a very limited stage in India," said Pratip Mazumdar, co-founder and partner at early-stage venture capital firm, Inflexor Ventures. But the lack of funds is also a key reality. In India, apart from Sarvam's $41-million Series A funding round in December 2023, there have been no large early-stage investments in AI-focused startups. Noida-based and Bengaluru's two startups that, alongside Sarvam, have been the first to be backed by the Centre's $1.2-billion IndiaAI Mission, have raised $5.25 million and $4 million in funding so far, respectively. Gurugram-based Soket AI Labs, the fourth of the first government-backed startups, has yet to raise a venture capital round and only has 'around $3 million from angel investors" so far, according to its founder and chief executive, Abhishek Upperwal. Government support 'This is why the government's AI Mission reducing the cost of access to processors for training AI models is crucial, and we're happy to offer equity to the government in exchange for the access," Upperwal said. Also read: The brain behind Generative AI has his sights set on India 'Venture capital investors in India have a limited appetite for investing in deep-tech R&D, which is crucial for AI startups to build a new foundational AI architecture that can be patented and licensed out for global usage in the long run—we've been trying to raise capital for the past two years, but to no avail," he said. The issue, policy experts said, goes beyond just the startups. A startup 'is only as able as the whole ecosystem—and no single entity can alone solve a fundamental issue in an entire industry", said Rohit Kumar, founding partner of The Quantum Hub and a consultant in various government and public sector initiatives. 'Fundamentally, R&D in India is still not well-prioritized—budgets are too little, and institutions do not have the means that their US and China counterparts have to pursue fundamental innovation," said Kumar. 'Incubators in top engineering institutes are hampered by bureaucratic processes, which isn't seen internationally—India is heavily shackled in these ways." In the long run, though, investors believe that a key balance between core innovation and nifty application development would be the right way forward. Vishesh Rajaram, managing partner at deep tech-focused venture capital firm Speciale Invest, said that while India is 'a little behind the curve at the moment, we haven't missed the bus in AI yet." 'A lot of the foundational work is hard, and has multiple challenges to the tale—access to infrastructure is limited, and the kind of talent that can actually undertake work that would be foundational or be patented is also limited. As a result, there's, of course, room for startups to catch up in terms of core engineering efforts, unlike how many refer to India having missed the opportunity to influence the global electronics and semiconductor industries," Rajaram said. Prayank Swaroop, partner at venture capital firm Accel, said for startups, 'the real opportunity lies in purpose-built AI applications that solve specific problems at scale. We're seeing Indian startups creating targeted solutions using existing foundational models as building blocks—this approach allows faster innovation cycles and can deliver significant value." Others, however, believe that more weight to fundamental innovation is the need of the hour for India. The Quantum Hub's Kumar cited China's technological progress as an example. 'The high-volume, low-margin secondary innovation markets also need to be captured. But, as China has proved, gains made in innovation at scale need to be reinvested into fundamental innovation," he said. 'China is a clear example of how that works, and we need to replicate this in India more efficiently."
