Making computer science research more accessible in India

Imagine that you are teaching a technical subject to children in a small village. They are eager to learn, but you face a problem: There are few resources to educate them in their mother tongue. This is a common experience in India, where the quality of textbooks written in many local languages pales in comparison to those written in English. To address educational inequality, the Indian government launched an initiative in 2020 that would improve the quality of these resources for hundreds of millions of people, but its implementation remains a massive undertaking. Siddhartha Jayanti, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) who is an affiliate of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Google Research, encountered this problem first-hand when teaching students in India about math, science, and English.