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Building Tomorrow: How Plaksha University is Shaping India’s Tech Frontier In an AI-driven world, tech universities have an important role of not just teaching new technologies, but also to help shape how they are built, understood, and applied. Plaksha University has spearheaded this mission at the intersection of deep-tech research, interdisciplinary innovation, and hands-on learning. From anchoring high-level policy discussions on national AI infrastructure to integrating machine learning directly into biotechnology, here is how Plaksha is driving India's AI transformation. Plaksha’s Founding Chancellor and Ex-Berkeley Engineering Dean, Dr. Shankar Sastry Tells Graduates AI's Next Big Test Is Going to be Financial Dr. Shankar Sastry, Plaksha University's founding Chancellor, brings credentials which are rare in Indian academia. Before Plaksha, he spent over a decade as Dean of Engineering at UC Berkeley, led the Information Technology Office at DARPA and held faculty positions at MIT and Harvard. At Plaksha's second convocation, he drew on that experience to tell graduates where AI is actually headed, and where it could go wrong. He pointed to work already underway at EMBER, Plaksha's Embodied Intelligence and Robotics lab, where his team is building humanoid robots that can assemble other robots, run search and rescue and play table tennis. He called this Physical AI, AI that moves off the screen and into the physical world, and said it will demand a new generation of lean, power efficient processors built for the edge. Referencing Richard Sutton's Bitter Lesson, the idea that more data beats clever engineering, Dr. Sastry cautioned that the race to feed ever larger models could break budgets before it breaks new ground. He called safe AI and alignment between competing agents the defining problem of the decade, one still unsolved. He closed by telling graduates their job is not just to build what comes next, but to leave society better off for it. Click here for the full address. Sarvam AI , Microsoft Research & BharatGen among other industry leaders came together to discuss a roadmap for global leadership to build India’s AI Engine What will it take for India to move from being one of the world's fastest adopters of AI to becoming a global leader in it? That question anchored ‘Building India's AI Engine’, a panel discussion hosted by Plaksha University on the eve of its second convocation, bringing together some of the biggest names shaping India's AI story. The panel included Vivek Raghavan, Co-founder of Sarvam AI, Sriram Rajamani, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Research, Maneesh Singh, Vice President of Machine Learning at BharatGen, Hitesh Oberoi, Co-promoter, MD and CEO of Info Edge, Neeraj Aggarwal, Vice Chair - Asia Pacific at Boston Consulting Group, and Dr. Shankar Sastry, Plaksha's founding Chancellor and Thomas Siebel Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. The conversation moved from building foundational models and scaling AI infrastructure to the harder questions of nurturing talent and building an ecosystem that can sustain research and innovation over the long run. It reflected the cross-sector thinking Plaksha aims to cultivate, bringing together individuals from distinct corners of India's AI landscape to examine what the country's path forward genuinely entails. Plaksha Brings Industry, Academia and Government Together at ConfBioTech 2026 to Shape Biotechnology's Next Decade