About

About us

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.

Automated Translation

Sanskrit, classical Tibetan, and classical Chinese to modern languages including Chinese, Tibetan, Korean, and Japanese

Semantic Search

Refining semantic search across a growing body of Sanskrit, Classical Tibetan, and Classical Chinese texts

Philologist's Toolkit

Develop 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
Dharmamitra

The MITRA project

MITRA is a research project in the Berkeley AI Research lab in EECS at the University of California, Berkeley. It is lead by Kurt Keutzer and Sebastian Nehrdich and focuses on bridging the linguistic divide between ancient wisdom source languages and contemporary languages through the application of advanced Deep Learning and AI technologies.

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 ancient wisdom 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 logo

monlam.ai

Machine translation data collection for Tibetan and English

Kumarajiva logo

Kumarajiva project

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

IIT-KGP logo

IIT Kharagpur

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

AI4Bharat logo

AI4Bharat

Development of Sanskrit data collection