Recent Current Affairs related to IISc

Samsung Semiconductor India Research has inaugurated a Quantum Research Lab on the IISc campus in Bengaluru to strengthen industry-academia collaboration in quantum technology research.

The lab is established with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) support from SSIR at the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering (DESE) of IISc to advance research in quantum technologies and semiconductor devices under Prof Mayank Shrivastava.

Mahesh Kakde, a professor at the IISc Bengaluru, has been named the winner of the 2026 Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians from Developing Countries for his work in algebraic number theory.

With this, he has become the 5th Indian to receive the honour. The award carries a cash prize of $10,000.

Pondicherry University (PU) has signed an MoU with the NIT Nagaland under the Anusandhan National Research Foundation-Partnerships for Accelerated Innovation and Research (ANRF-PAIR) program to bolster academic and research cooperation.

It is to be noted that NIT Nagaland is the first institution from the North-East region to participate in the PAIR project. Under the PAIR Network Scheme, the IISc Bengaluru will act as the hub institution, while PU and NIT Nagaland will serve as the spoke institutions.

According to the “World University Rankings 2027” released by the Times Higher Education (THE) during the World Academic Summit hosted by the University of Cape Town, South Africa, the IISc Bengaluru is the highest-ranked institution in India, ranking 254th worldwide with an overall score of 57.

The University of Oxford (UK) is ranked top for the 11th consecutive year, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA). Princeton University (USA) and Stanford University (USA) are jointly ranked third, while the University of Cambridge (UK) is ranked fifth.

Union Minister Pralhad Joshi has inaugurated the Seva First Innovation Challenge (SFIC) for the South Zone in IISc Bengaluru.

The initiative aims to encourage youth to identify community-level problems and develop innovative, testable, and scalable solutions.

The Ministry of Minority Affairs (MoMA) has signed MoUs with prominent academic, research, and innovation institutions, including the IIT Madras, the IISc Bengaluru, and IIM Bangalore, to enhance scheme implementation, monitoring, infrastructure quality, and innovation ecosystems.

Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), an Institution of Eminence (IoE) Deemed to be University, has been selected as one of the three Indian host institutions for the US-India Fellowship for the 2026-27 academic cycle.

The fellowship is a 12-month programme designed to strengthen scientific and technological collaboration between India and the USA. Selected fellows will receive a monthly stipend of $1,650 to support their research and collaborative activities.

The IISc Bengaluru, has established the Foundation for Quantum Computing Innovation (FQCI) to function as the Quantum Computing Thematic Hub (QC T-Hub) under the National Quantum Mission (NQM). It is to be noted that the NQM is implemented by the Department of Science and Technology (DST).

FQCI is tasked with developing skilled manpower and promoting entrepreneurship in quantum technologies through 5 specialized programmes: Quantum Computing (QC) Rise, QC Bridge, QC Leap, QC Accel, and QC Quest.

The SPIRE Lab of the IISc Bengaluru, in collaboration with the AI and Robotics Technology Park (ARTPARK) and Google, has launched an open-source speech AI model named SraVaani.

The model is capable of recognizing 65 Indian languages and dialects. It has been released under a permissive Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) licence on the Hugging Face platform.

The Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) has signed a tripartite agreement with the IISc Bengaluru and the Foundation for Science Innovation and Development (FSID) to establish a C-DOT Centre of Excellence (CoE) at the FSID, IISc Bengaluru.