Amrita Research Institutes

Amma places a strong emphasis on research activities in all of Her educational institutions. Rather than simply memorising all the knowledge that has been accumulated in a particular field, Amma wants Her to children to delve deeper, to explore, to discover for themselves. She is always encouraging the students and faculty of Amrita Institutions to undertake research-and-development work that will benefit society.

They are heeding Her call: exciting, original research is taking place in the fields of information technology, engineering and medicine, among others.

Amrita Research Lab (ARL) unveiled Amrita VPN (Virtual Private Network), a new, easy-to-use networking software that allows users to connect their home, office and laptop onto a single network. The same institution recently hosted a National Workshop on Information Security and Cryptography, and is on the cusp of releasing Amrita TutGen, an open-source web-tutorial generator. AITF also has plans to conduct research on using Sanskrit for Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing

Centre of Excellence in Computational Engineering & Networking (CEN), which functions in the Ettimidai Campus of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham is playing an important role for the future of the scientific-discovery process and engineering design. The CEN labs are currently conducting research in many innovative areas of engineering, working towards developing: a massively parallel Partial Differential Equation (PDE) solver; a massively parallel design and analysis platform for flow visualization and fluid dynamics; reliable truss topology optimiser; setting up a full-fledged Bio-informatics lab.

The Amrita Institute of Medical Science (AIMS) is currently engaged in no less than 50 research projects, including among many others: the Department of Cardiology setting up a registry of all cases of rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease in Kerala's Ernakulam district (population: 10 lakhs) and educating the community to the need for Primary (Prophylaxis) prevention of rheumatic fever and heart disease; developing a strong clinical research programme focusing on outcome analysis and cost-effective paediatric cardiac care, and problems unique to the developing world; organising the Amrita Heart Foundation (AHF), which is aimed at educating people and creating awareness as to how heart ailments can best be prevented via appropriate changes in diet, recourse to exercise and modifications to the present day lifestyles. The Nephrology Department is doing clinical research on various aspects of dialysis, such as improving the quality of life and survival on dialysis; the Digestive Disease Institute is involved in extensive research in the area of chronic pancreatitis, peculiar to the tropics; AIMS is contemplating the establishment of an Ayurveda Wing and Naturopathy & Yoga Specialty clinic attached to the Super Specialty hospital to enable specialists in respective systems of Medicine to interact and to suggest which system of medicine suits a particular disease

AIMS is also doing pioneering work in the exciting field of Telemedicine, a method by which specialist doctors can examine, investigate, monitor and treat patients in remote areas through satellite video conferencing. AIMS is the first institution in Kerala to begin using telemedicine to treat patients in Lakshadweep Islands and other remote places in India like Leh Ladakh. The Institute is currently connected to about 25 centres and constantly extending its wing.