Ensuring the safety of embodied AI agents during task planning is critical for real-world deployment, especially in household environments where dangerous instructions pose significant risks. Existing methods often suffer from either high computational costs due to preference alignment training or over-rejection when using single-agent safety prompts. To address these limitations, we propose MADRA, a training-free Multi-Agent Debate Risk Assessment framework that leverages collective reasoning to enhance safety awareness without sacrificing task performance. MADRA employs multiple LLM-based agents to debate the safety of a given instruction, guided by a critical evaluator that scores responses based on logical soundness, risk identification, evidence quality, and clarity. Through iterative deliberation and consensus voting, MADRA significantly reduces false rejections while maintaining high sensitivity to dangerous tasks. Additionally, we introduce a hierarchical cognitive collaborative planning framework that integrates safety, memory, planning, and self-evolution mechanisms to improve task success rates through continuous learning. We also contribute SafeAware-VH, a benchmark dataset for safety-aware task planning in VirtualHome, containing 800 annotated instructions. Extensive experiments on AI2-THOR and VirtualHome demonstrate that our approach achieves over 90% rejection of unsafe tasks while ensuring that safe-task rejection is low, outperforming existing methods in both safety and execution efficiency. Our work provides a scalable, model-agnostic solution for building trustworthy embodied agents.

CHENNAI: Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) Researchers have developed an Artificial Intelligence-based tool, 'PIVOT', …

The Indian Institute of Technology Madras has developed a fellowship program to encourage early-career AI researchers. The Narayanan Family Foundation and the Institute's Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and AI have teamed up to build a fellowship in Artificial Intelligence for Social Good. The application is available to artificial intelligence researchers who want to use their skills for the betterment. The Indian Institute of Technology Madras hopes to attract recent PhD graduates or newly qualified researchers in computer science, computational and data sciences, biomedical sciences, management, finance, and other engineering departments with outstanding educational achievements to RBCDSAI through this program, which is funded by the Narayanan Family Foundation. With India's largest network analytics and deep reinforcement learning study groups, RBCDSAI is a world's most prominent interdisciplinary research academic centre for Data Science and AI.

The SaaS company will explore how it can leverage AI to improve its software's lead conversion capabilities Is IIT-M becoming India's new-age technology hub? New-age technology like artificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way in bringing unique solutions for companies working across multiple sectors. The revolutionary technology has also become a go-to innovation tool for software-as-a-service (SAAS) companies as well. This time SaaS unicorn Freshworks has partnered with Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence in Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT Madras) to improve the predictive capability of its customer relationship management (CRM) software. Freshworks will initially work with the centre exploring how it can leverage AI to improve its software's lead-conversion capabilities, helping its clients to increase their business.

NEW DELHI: A team of students at IIT Madras has developed a drone technology that can help in rescue and relief operations, especially after natural disasters. "The solution is beta-ready and can be deployed. It is currently being tested and would reach the commercialisation phase within six months," said Ayush Parasbhai Maniar, student member, UAVs for Disaster Management, Centre for Innovation (CFI) -- Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras. "The iterations to improve every feature would continue. The team's artificial intelligence (AI)-based solution is used in combination with drones that use swarm intelligence to collect data and analyse it in real-time. The project is being executed with data inputs from the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF). The drone, or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), will have a software that will be compatible with standard drones available in the market. "Thus, for the physical drone we would be partnering with a drone company," Maniar said. This IIT team has also won. 10 lakh in funding from the Indian Innovation Growth Programme (IIGP 2.0) University Challenge, a programme conducted by the department of science and technology along with global defence manufacturer Lockheed Martin Corporation and Tata Trusts. "This solution is based on innovation based on futuristic disruptive technologies.

Ask poverty attorney Joanna Green Brown for an example of a client who fell through the cracks and lost social services benefits they may have been eligible for because of a program driven by artificial intelligence (AI), and you will get an earful. There was the "highly educated and capable" client who had had heart failure and was on a heart and lung transplant wait list. The questions he was presented in a Social Security benefits application "didn't encapsulate his issue" and his child subsequently did not receive benefits. "It's almost impossible for an AI system to anticipate issues related to the nuance of timing," Green Brown says. Then there's the client who had to apply for a Medicaid recertification, but misread a question and received a denial a month later.

A new research center is to be established in India to undertake foundational research in many areas of data science and artificial intelligence (AI) applicable in the Indian context, and create societal impact through multidisciplinary interactions with government, academic, research and industrial collaborators. The center, a collaboration between Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions (RBEI) and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras), will receive around US$0.5m per year funding for five years to carry out research in areas like deep learning, reinforcement learning, network analytics, interpretable machine learning, and domain aware AI. Its activity will include research projects, knowledge management and dissemination, developing prototypes, outreach projects, and setting up collaborative facilities and laboratories among others. The center's mandate requires interaction with industry and other universities, including international student and faculty exchanges. The objective is to advance scientific innovation for societal benefit.