For most students, accessing textbooks is routine. For visually challenged students, it often means dealing with missing Braille editions, poor audio recordings, or expensive software. A new digital initiative developed at the International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT-H) is now working to change that. The initiative, called Drishti Library, aims to make higher-education textbooks available in Braille and audiobook formats using artificial intelligence and language technologies. The project has been developed by researcher Krishna Tulsiyan under the guidance of Professors C V Jawahar and Gurpreet Singh Lehal and is part of the Government of India’s Bhashini mission, which focuses on building AI-based language tools for Indian languages. The platform was recently unveiled at a symposium on Language AI for Accessibility. It currently focuses on Punjabi language textbooks and is gradually expanding to other Indian languages and academic disciplines. Drishti Library uses optical character recognition (OCR) systems developed under a national consortium to scan and convert textbooks into accessible formats.

IIITH hosted the Winter Dialogue on Responsible AI for Synergistic Excellence (RAISE) as an official pre-summit event of the AI Impact Summit 2026 on 20 January. The four-city Winter Dialogue series is organised by Ashoka University and NIMS Jaipur jointly with IIITH and C-CAMP Bangalore. The one-day dialogue brought together leaders from healthcare, technology, policy, academia, and startups to explore how AI can responsibly transform healthcare delivery through intelligent, accessible, and human centred technologies. With HealthTech and AI as the central theme, the Winter Dialogue examined opportunities for AI-powered healthcare innovation, challenges in building and scaling healthcare startups, and pathways for taking Indian health AI solutions to global markets. Prof. SK Shukla said, “As AI becomes embedded in healthcare decision-making, the focus must move beyond technological capability to responsibility, trust, and real-world impact. Platforms like the Winter Dialogue are essential for aligning innovation with ethical, patient-centric outcomes.”

IIITH doesn’t just believe in translational research. It walks the talk as evidenced by its latest Best Paper award-winning research that has resulted in the development of an IoT-based UPS detection device at COMSNETS-2026 held in Bangalore. The idea for a low-cost UPS monitoring system at IIITH did not begin in a laboratory or a funding proposal. It began with a familiar frustration – raised by Prakash Nayak, a campus IT staffer who was tired of equipment failures with no clear explanation. Power outages were happening. Servers were restarting. Despite the installation of UPS units everywhere, no one could say with certainty what the UPS systems were actually doing when the lights went out. That real-world problem became the starting point for a research project that has now resulted in a ₹2,000 IoT-based device capable of tracking UPS behaviour during outages with near-second precision. The research was documented in a paper titled, “Low-cost IoT-based Downtime Detection for UPS and Behaviour Analysis,” by authors Sannidhya Gupta, Prakash Nayak, and Prof. Sachin Chaudhari.