Workshop Programme

The topic of consciousness, despite being hard to even define, has today attracted much research attention from a diversity of domains spanning philosophy, science, technology, psychology, and spirituality. Consensus is gradually emerging in the scientific community on the proposal that consciousness, whichever way we describe our subjective experience of it, may not be a product or property of the material world that makes up our life form and our brains.

Notions of consciousness have been rooted in Indic thought over millennia, and many ideas drawn from ancient writings seem to resonate well with modern lines of inquiry into topics that fall squarely in emerging AI. It is not surprising to see scientists working in AI and robotics grappling with terms such as 'self', 'awareness', 'being', consciousness, ethics, and responsible action — terms that seem native to the vast Indic literature of our ancient land. With the prospect of AGI emerging from modern AI technologies sooner than later, the question on whether AI-driven agents and robots can turn conscious is raging at the present time.

The objective of the workshop is to constructively explore ideas rooted in Indic thought and literature which may assist and enrich our understanding of the challenges facing research in this area.

This workshop is supported by The Chittosha Collective, an informal group of researchers at IIIT Bangalore.

Digital Public Infrastructures (DPI) are increasingly shaping the delivery of public services - identity systems, payments, health platforms, and data exchanges across the world. As DPI ecosystems expand, consent management has emerged as a concern for enabling trustworthy, transparent, and user-centric data sharing. At the same time, the rise of generative and agentic AI systems introduces new challenges around informed consent, automated decision-making, and cross-platform accountability.

This half-day workshop brings together researchers, developers, policymakers, civil society practitioners, and DPI implementers to collaborate and brainstorm on different challenges while designing DPIs.

The workshop aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue while identifying future research directions for trustworthy DPIs to deliver social impact in the age of AI. In this spirit we would also like to invite people working in the domain to send a short paper on their work.