From Scale to Resilience: Rethinking Efficient AI System: Working Group Meeting

Date: 20 January 2026

A working group meeting, From Scale to Resilience: Rethinking Efficient AI System was convened on 20 January 2026 at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru. This was a pre-event meeting to the India–AI Impact Summit 2026 that was organised by India during 16–20 February 2026. As part of the working group meeting, a public event was conducted at the A V Rama Rao auditorium at IISc and KIAC helped to organise the event as a part of the team from IISc.

The event began with the lighting of the lamp by the dignitaries present, namely Dr Shalini Rajneesh, Chief Secretary, Government of Karnataka; Shri Pankaj Kumar Pandey, Principal Secretary to Government, Department of Personnel and Administrative Reforms (e-Governance) and Managing Director, Karnataka Power Transmission Corporation; Shri Shashank Misra, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Power; Mr Abhishek Aggarwal, Scientist D, IndiaAI, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeiTY); and Professor Rajesh Sundaresan, Convenor, Deans of Divisions, IISc. This was followed by a felicitation of the dignitaries, who then spoke on various facets of resilient AI systems. It is to be noted that in his talk, Rajesh Sundaresan mentioned the Kotak IISc AI–ML Centre: “In an effort to unite all these core activities and initiatives at IISc, the Institute has enabled the Kotak IISc AI–ML Centre (KIAC) for capacity building: at the undergraduate level through the BTech (Mathematics and Computing) programme, the graduate level MTech (Artificial Intelligence) programme, and a new PhD programme in AI as well as AI+X where the +X is to indicate the growing influence of AI in almost every field.”

The first session on ‘Overcoming Data and Compute Challenges: A Research Viewpoint’, had a keynote address by S Gopalakrishnan, Chairman, Axilor Ventures, followed by talks by Dr Venkat Padmanabhan, Managing Director, Microsoft Research India; Dr Prateek Jain, Distinguished Scientist, Google Deep Mind; and Professor Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, Associate Professor, IISc. The second session on ‘Challenges and Strategies in AI Research and Impact Pathways’ had a keynote address by Dr Devi Prasad Shetty, Chairman and Founder, Narayana Health, followed by talks by Professor Sriram Ganapathy, Co-Chief Project Manager, TANUH, IISc, and Mr Shobhit Banga, Co-Founder, Josh Talks. The final session of the workshop was a panel discussion on ‘Building AI Systems at Scale’, which was moderated by Mr Anirban Sarma, Director, Centre for Digital Societies, Observer Research Foundation. The panellists included Shri T Bhoobalan, Chief Executive Officer, Centre for e-Governance, Government of Karnataka; Mr Prasad Unnikrishnan, Partner and Leader, Grant Thornton Bharat LLP; Dr Prateek Jain; Dr Venkat Padmanabhan; and Mr Ankit Bose, Head of Nasscom AI and CEO of Center of Excellence for Data Science and AI. Two questions were mainly addressed in the panel discussion, namely (i) How do we make AI affordable, accessible, and responsible? (ii) What gaps in policy funding and technology do we need to address? The workshop concluded with remarks by Abhishek Aggarwal and a vote of thanks by Chiranjib Bhattacharyya, Professor, IISc.