About

MITRA's Mission

MITRA’s Mission is to harness the rapidly evolving AI technologies to promote the scholarly study and personal practice of the dharma and to accelerate academic and individual research through open-source collaboration on datasets, models and applications.

Currently MITRA’s mission is to facilitate the study and practice of dharma through:

  • providing an automated machine translation capability from Sanskrit, classical Tibetan, and classical Chinese into a variety of modern languages including Chinese, Tibetan, Korean, and Japanese;
  • enabling the semantic search of a growing body of texts in Sanskrit, Classical Tibetan, and Classical Chinese;
  • developing tools to facilitate the study of Sanskrit and Classical Tibetan.

In the future we hope to provide Generative AI tools that enable elevating and transformative experiences through:

  • Immersive 3D experiences in maṇḍala
  • Generation of 2D art based on canonical guildelines

The MITRA project

The MITRA project, spearheaded by Kurt Keutzer and Sebastian Nehrdich, focuses on bridging the linguistic divide between Buddhist source languages and contemporary languages through the application of advanced Deep Learning and AI technologies.

Dharmamitra

Initiated in 2023, the project quickly evolved from its conceptual phase to a dynamic development process, accelerated by its collaborative efforts with organizations such as monlam.ai and with contributions from a diverse array of sources, including translators and AI researchers. Leveraging a robust corpus of over four million sentence pairs from various sourcesand utilizing Google's MADLAD-400 model as a foundation, MITRA has fine-tuned a specialized translation model that not only promises enhanced fluency in translations but also aims to significantly expand access to Buddhist texts.

Through continuous improvements in data quality, sentence alignment, and model fine-tuning, the project seeks to overcome the challenges inherent in low-resource language translation. The MITRA project stands as a testament to the transformative potential of AI in transcending language barriers, embodying a commitment to cultural preservation, academic research, and the democratization of access to Tibetan literature and wisdom.

Collaborations

monlam.ai

Machine translation data collection for Tibetan and English

Kumarajiva project

Development of Tibetan<>Chinese capabilities and user interface for specific translation purposes.

IIT Kharagpur

Development of Sanskrit translation model development. Sanskrit<>English dataset compilation

AI4Bharat

Development of Sanskrit data collection