UPES Inaugurates CoE for AI to Drive Innovation and Research Excellence

The School of Computer Science (SoCS) at UPES has inaugurated its Centre of Excellence for Artificial Intelligence, a transformative initiative focused on advancing interdisciplinary research, education, and innovation in AI and Machine Learning. The event featured Dr. Shailesh Kumar, Chief Data Scientist at Reliance Jio’s Centre of Excellence in AI/ML, as the Chief Guest.

Conceived as a future-focused platform, the Centre aims to bridge the gap between AI’s vast potential and its scalable, practical adoption across sectors. Core objectives include developing foundational and advanced AI skills, building educational tools to boost productivity, supporting long-term research, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, and converting academic insights into commercial solutions.

A Platform for Learning, Innovation, and Real-World Impact

The Centre’s strategic focus spans five pillars—research and development, training and capacity building, product creation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and commercialisation. In its initial rollout, the Centre will offer training modules in Python, statistics, and machine learning, followed by advanced courses in computer vision, natural language processing, and scientific computing. It will also develop proprietary AI tools like quiz generators and lip-synced video platforms to support educators and learners.

During the keynote, it was highlighted that AI is reshaping how we live, learn, manufacture, shop, and maintain health. As a horizontal technology, AI enhances the efficiency of systems and productivity across sectors. Centres like this are critical to driving future innovation, enabling students to experiment and innovate while building a collaborative ecosystem of domain experts, data scientists, and policymakers. AI has the power to transform Bharat—and, in turn, Bharat will also shape the evolution of AI.

Scaling Research, Infrastructure, and Multidisciplinary Collaboration

The Centre will further catalyse innovation through hackathons, interdisciplinary forums, and strong academic-industry collaborations. It aims to deliver research with real-world impact across areas such as healthcare, education, finance, and the social sciences. With a focus on entrepreneurship, IP creation, and consulting services, the Centre will grow into a hub for commercial-ready AI solutions.

UPES is expanding its innovation ecosystem, with the Centre for AI joining its other established centres in IoT, Cybersecurity, and AR/VR. A state-of-the-art High Performance Computing facility—launched alongside the Centre—opens a new chapter for collaborative research, powered by robust infrastructure.

The Centre underscores a commitment to creating local, scalable, and inclusive AI capabilities. With a strong foundation in multidisciplinary research and a diverse academic community, UPES is well-positioned to unlock AI’s full potential across domains including law, design, health sciences, and engineering.

An investment commitment of ₹50 crore underpins this initiative, with one of the most advanced AI computing infrastructures among private Indian universities. The facility includes multiple Newgen NVIDIA DGX H100 clusters, 16 GPUs, 1.28 TB of GPU RAM, and petabyte-scale storage. Housed in the renovated IT Tower, this setup enables high-fidelity simulations, large-scale LLM deployments, and rapid prototyping of AI tools.

The inauguration brought together academic leaders, industry stakeholders, faculty, and students, signaling the beginning of a bold new era of AI-led transformation at UPES.