How Thapar Institute is embedding AI across disciplines through global partnerships, industry collaboration and future-ready education.
Thapar Institute AI
When the All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) designated 2025 as the “Year of Artificial Intelligence,” it sent a clear signal to higher education institutions across the country. Artificial intelligence was no longer to be treated as a peripheral specialisation or an optional add-on, but as a defining force reshaping disciplines, professions, and society itself.
For the Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology (TIET), however, this announcement marked not a beginning, but a validation. The Institute has been consciously and systematically moving in this direction for several years. Treating AI not as a buzzword, but as a foundational academic and institutional capability.
At TIET, artificial intelligence is not confined to a single department or programme. It informs how we teach, how we conduct research, how we engage with industry, and how we understand our responsibility to society. Through sustained industry partnerships, global academic collaborations, and deep curricular integration, the Institute is positioning itself within a broader national transition toward an AI-literate, innovation-driven knowledge ecosystem.
1. Building Specialists, Not Just Generalists:
Artificial intelligence at TIET is embedded by design, not by addition. In technical collaboration with NVIDIA, a global leader in accelerated computing, the Institute has established a Centre of Excellence in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. This places TIET among a small group of Indian institutions operating with both scale and depth in advanced AI education and research. The collaboration gives students and faculty access to industry-grade infrastructure that closely mirrors real-world enterprise and research environments. NVIDIA DGX systems powered by H100 and A100 Tensor Core GPUs, along with a large edge-computing ecosystem built around NVIDIA Jetson developer kits, enable learning that is immersive, applied, and grounded in real deployment contexts.
Students do not merely study artificial intelligence as a theoretical construct. They design, build, and deploy solutions, working on generative AI models, edge intelligence, and autonomous systems across domains such as healthcare, urban infrastructure, cybersecurity, robotics, and sustainability. The emphasis is on depth, problem-solving, and deployment readiness. Graduates emerge not merely AI-aware, but genuinely AI-capable, prepared to contribute meaningfully from the outset in global technology, research, and innovation environments.
2. Global Collaboration and Human-Centric AI
Artificial intelligence is inherently global, and its most consequential challenges are deeply interdisciplinary. Recognising this, TIET has strengthened its international research footprint through a strategic collaboration with The University of Queensland, Australia. The joint Centre of Excellence in Data Science and AI serves as a platform for human-centric research that addresses complex global problems.
Research under this collaboration spans AI-enabled healthcare diagnostics, sustainable agriculture, intelligent infrastructure, and advanced cybersecurity. The emphasis is not only on technical sophistication, but on social relevance, ethical responsibility, and long-term impact. This partnership is further reinforced through a jointly supervised PhD programme, enabling doctoral scholars to spend three years at TIET and one year at the University of Queensland. The programme provides exposure to complementary research ecosystems in India and Australia, fostering globally informed scholarship, cross-cultural academic exchange, and high-impact outcomes in data science and artificial intelligence.
3. Democratizing Intelligence Across Disciplines:
In alignment with AICTE’s vision for interdisciplinary integration, TIET has embedded artificial intelligence across its entire academic ecosystem. Whether students pursue engineering, management, liberal arts and sciences, or advanced doctoral research, engagement with AI is a structured and integral part of their academic journey.
Every graduating student, across undergraduate, postgraduate, and PhD programmes, earns between nine and twelve academic credits through AI-focused micro-credentials. These are designed to provide both conceptual grounding and applied understanding of how artificial intelligence is reshaping industries, research methodologies, governance structures, and society at large. The outcome is a generation of graduates who can engage meaningfully with AI within their chosen domains, rather than viewing it as a narrow or siloed technical skill.
4. Building an AI-Literate Academic Culture:
Sustainable educational transformation begins with educators. Alongside student-facing initiatives, TIET has invested systematically in faculty development and institutional capacity building. Through AICTE-approved programmes and ATAL Academy initiatives, the Institute regularly conducts Faculty Development Programmes in areas such as generative AI, deep learning, and advanced machine-learning applications.
This sustained investment ensures that pedagogy remains current, research remains relevant, and classrooms evolve into spaces of inquiry rather than instruction alone. More importantly, it has enabled the emergence of a campus-wide culture of AI literacy, one that values experimentation, encourages interdisciplinary engagement, and treats learning as a lifelong process.
Looking Ahead: Educating AI Architects, Not Just Users
As India moves deeper into the so-called “Year of AI,” the responsibility of higher education extends far beyond producing technically competent users of artificial intelligence. The real challenge is to educate AI architects, individuals who understand not only how AI systems function, but also their ethical foundations, societal consequences, and long-term transformative potential.
At the Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology, this future is already being shaped through its classrooms, research centres, global collaborations, and industry partnerships. By embedding AI across disciplines, investing in deep capability building, and aligning education with meaningful real-world impact, TIET is reframing what it means to be truly future-ready in the age of artificial intelligence.
Subscribe today by clicking the link and stay updated with the latest news!" Click here!
