Thiagarajar College of Engineering (TCE) Madurai has launched TAMARAI, a global research centre for Tamil and Artificial Intelligence.
Marking the founder’s day, the TAMARAI was launched with the aim to revolutionise the landscape of technological innovation in the region, said TCE Correspondent and Chairman Hari Thiagarajan. He told The Hindu that the long-term mission of the centre was to develop a Large Language Model, a sort of Tamil ChatGPT.
The state-of-the-art facility would foster growth and propel the institution into a future driven by AI. Further, the mission of the centre was to pioneer the development of inclusive and representative AI models for Tamil language bridging the gap between ancient wisdom and modern technology.
By democratising access to centuries of Tamil literature and knowledge through open source innovation, the Centre would aim to empower Tamil community globally by providing AI tools that respect and elevate their language and culture.
The AI centre, Mr. Thiagarajan said, would be a testament to this commitment, fostering collaboration between academia and industry, thereby leveraging AI to modernise Tamil language making it more accessible in various digital platforms.
The Centre would be funded by industries and guided by leading researchers from higher learning institutions in India and from Silicon valley. It would also focus on challenges related to language translation, document summarisation, paraphrase identification and Tamil corpus creation.
Soma Velayutham, an executive in the AI field from California said that TCE is uniquely positioned to contribute to the Tamil GenAI domain, with its wealth of Tamil resources and scholars from Thiagarajar College of Arts and Science, the release said.
