IITM-incubated One-Fourth Labs launches affordable data science course

The course is priced at Rs 1,000; top performers will be invited to 'summer garage,' an AI residency programme at IIT Madras Research Park

One-Fourth Labs, a start-up founded by two faculty members of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IITM) and incubated in the institute, has launched an online self-paced course on foundations of data science, at an affordable cost.

The course, priced at Rs 1,000 for students and faculty members, has been launched under the company's online school platform ‘PadhAI’, which also means the path in Tamil. The start-Up has been founded by Mitesh Khapra and Pratyush Kumar, Assistant Professors in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Madras.

While there is rising demand for trained data scientists across the manufacturing sector and in areas such as financial services, healthcare, education, and IT, most courses are expensively priced, ranging from tens of thousands to even lakhs of rupees. As a result, there is a heavy premium on acquiring the skills needed to pursue this lucrative career path, the company said.

The founders said that the primary goal of the course is to ensure that every college student in the country in engineering, science, or commerce disciplines has access to a foundational understanding of data science, which is an essential skill for the future.

Every year, the top-performing students from PadhAI will be invited to ‘summer garage,’ an AI residency programme at IIT Madras Research Park where they can work on research, tackle problems of societal impact, or find solutions to commercial value.

Khapra and Kumar also launched a platform, ‘AI4Bharat’, to build artificial intelligence solutions to address India’s problems and accelerate AI Innovation. It is a community of AI professionals, students, domain experts, policy makers and academicians collaborating on solving real-world challenges in Agriculture, Healthcare, Smart Cities, Digital India and sustainability.