Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan grants Rs 30 crore to boost research at IISc

To encourage research work at Bengaluru-based Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Infosys co-founder Senapathy Gopalakrishnan, popularly known as Kris Gopalakrishnan and his wife Sudha have set up three research chairs in the country’s top institution, according to an ET report.

Gopalakrishnan, 60, hopes the chairs can bring distinguished researchers in the areas of computational neuroscience, machine learning, data science and neuromorphic engineering to the IISc to enable collaborative research.

The first of the three chairs — K Vaidyanathan Distinguished Chair named after Sudha's father — was launched on Monday. Each chair will be set up with a corpus of Rs 10 crore funded by Pratiksha Trust. It is a charitable organization Kris founded with his wife.

Moreover, the Pratiksha Trust has also helped to set up three similar chairs at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, where Kris studied.

"I hope the launching of these distinguished chair positions will help push the frontiers in these areas. It would be excellent if the collaborations lead to highly creative, new computing architectures and algorithms inspired by the functioning of the brain. These three chairs along with three more at IIT Madras will create critical mass in the area of neuromorphic computing and machine learning in India," Kris told the financial daily.

The K Vaidyanathan Chair at the IISc will be occupied by Shihab Shamma, a professor at the Institute of Systems Research of the University of Maryland.

"I am sure these distinguished chair positions will add a new dimension to research collaboration in key strategic areas between IISc researchers and star contributors in these areas anywhere in the world," IISc Director Anurag Kumar told ET.

At IIT-Madras, two of the three chairs — Prof Mahabala Chair and N R Narayana Murthy Chair — on computational brain research have also been launched.

Both chairs are occupied by US-based scientists of Indian origin. In early 2014, the Infosys cofounder announced a Rs 225-crore grant over a period of 10 years to develop a Centre for Brain Research (CBR) at the IISc.

This philanthropic act is widely-considered one of the biggest contributions to pure science in the country, and one of the single largest donations by an individual to the IISc.
(Image: Reuters)