IIT Mandi, April 1: The Technology Innovation Hub (TIH) at the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi successfully concluded HIVE 3.0, a three-day conclave on Collaborative Intelligence anchored on the theme of Multimodal AI. The event brought together technology leaders, industry practitioners, policymakers, and academic researchers from across India and beyond, establishing itself as a defining platform for shaping the nation’s strategy in one of the most transformative frontiers of artificial intelligence.
HIVE 3.0 created a rare and powerful intersection of vision and application where cutting-edge research met real-world industry challenges, and where India’s deep technology talent found a collaborative forum to build, question, and co-create in the domain of Multimodal AI.
“HIVE 3.0 marks a definitive shift from isolated AI to Collaborative Intelligence. By bridging the gap between visionary academic research and industrial pragmatism, we are not just building models; we are building a multimodal ecosystem where sight, sound, and context converge. IIT Mandi’s initiative to establish an Industry-Research Ready Lab on Multimodal AI named “MI-RA” ensures that India isn’t just a consumer of AI, but a global leader in creating human-centric, India-specific technology solutions, said Mr. Padma Bhushan Kris Gopalakrishnan, Co-Founder, Infosys, Chairman, Axilor Ventures & Chairman, Mission Governing Board, NM-ICPS | Chief Guest, HIVE 3.0
Over the course of three intensive days, HIVE 3.0 featured keynote addresses, panel discussions, research presentations, and working sessions that together addressed the opportunities and challenges of Multimodal AI, a paradigm that integrates text, vision, audio, and structured data into unified intelligent systems. Participants engaged in substantive debates on topics spanning technical architecture, real-world deployment, ethical frameworks, and India-specific use cases.
The conclave underscored the urgent need for India to build indigenous capability and research infrastructure in AI not merely as a consumer of global technology, but as an active contributor, creator, and standards-setter in the global AI landscape.
A defining highlight of HIVE 3.0 was the formal inauguration of MI-RA (Multimodal Intelligence for Real-World Applications), IIT Mandi TIH’s state-of-the-art Multimodal AI laboratory, unveiled by Chief Guest Mr. Kris Gopalakrishnan. MI-RA represents a significant leap in India’s research infrastructure for advanced AI purpose-built to accelerate cutting-edge work at the intersection of vision, language, audio, and structured intelligence.
Designed in close collaboration with industry partners, MI-RA is envisioned as a living lab where academic researchers and industry technologists co-develop solutions to real-world challenges using multimodal AI. The lab is equipped with high-performance computing infrastructure and data aggregation equipment for building curated multimodal India-centric datasets, and collaborative workspaces that enable both foundational research and rapid prototyping.
