Indian academia has scored a big win in the global tech space. Mitesh Khapra, Associate Professor at IIT Madras, has been named among TIME Magazine’s 2025 list of the 100 most influential people in AI, a roster usually dominated by corporate giants like Elon Musk and Sam Altman.
While most names on the list helm billion-dollar AI firms, Khapra represents the power of research and open science. His work focuses on natural language processing, machine learning, and creating AI systems that understand Indian languages, a space often overlooked by mainstream global models.
Education Journey
Khapra earned his MTech and PhD from IIT Bombay before joining IBM Research India as a scientist. His transition to academia brought multiple honours, including the IBM PhD Fellowship, Microsoft Rising Star Award, and the Google Faculty Research Award (2018).
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Currently, he teaches and leads projects at IIT Madras’ Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI.
What is AI4Bharat?
In 2019, Khapra co-founded AI4Bharat, an open-source initiative housed at IIT Madras. The project builds datasets, models, and tools tailored for Indian languages, empowering developers, startups, and researchers to build AI solutions for India’s linguistic diversity.
Recognition Beyond Borders
TIME’s profile highlights how Khapra’s work is inspiring a shift in Indian research priorities. "Fifteen years back, an average PhD student in India working on language technology would end up working on English problems,” TIME reported him as saying. “With these datasets available, I see a shift: now Indian students are working on Indian problems.”
