In 2021, the Bhupat & Jyoti Mehta Family Foundation (MFF) established a second Mehta Family School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, this time in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IITR), the oldest technical institution in Asia. Situated in the foothills of the Himalayas in northeast India, IITR’s 365-acre campus makes it one of the largest technical institutes in India, and its number of academic departments (23) are unmatched in the country.

The nearly 36-thousand-square-foot School for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, to be housed in a new dedicated facility on IITR’s main campus, will offer bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree programs, creating 21st-century talent in DS and AI and fostering growth in India. ITTR professor Narayana Prasad Padhy will be the first director of the school, which expects to admit approximately 2,000 students and graduate approximately 400 students in its first seven years. Construction of the school will begin in 2022 and is projected to be completed by 2024. The school will welcome its first cohort of bachelor’s degree students in September 2022.

MFF’s selection of IITR was based on the institute’s location and its rich history of academic and research excellence in the fields of science, technology, and engineering. Faculty areas of expertise include optimization and numerical techniques for machine learning (ML); casual inference, knowledge representation, and logic in AI; and theoretical foundations of data science, AI, and ML algorithms, models, and analyses. This expertise will be augmented by Professors Ananth Grama, Shankar Subramaniam, and Rajesh Gupta, who are leading international academics and MFF CARE advisors with direct experience in DS and AI and in creating academic programs. 

Students will benefit from the school’s unique interdisciplinary program, which includes using DS and AI to solve a series of “grand challenges” that attempt to solve local challenges. Graduates, too, will benefit from the program, which will prepare them to continue their research and development efforts in the public and private sectors, including universities, national laboratories, government agencies, and businesses, where innovations in DS and AI hold the promise of solving some of the most pressing problems facing the world today.

As noted by Dr. K VijayRaghavan, Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India, “AI technologies are critical for India and will have a significant social and economic impact in the coming years.”

Students who would like to learn more about the Mehta Family School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and the enrollment/placement requirements may contact IITR. International faculty interested in partnering with IITR may contact MFF.