SRINAGAR: The National Institute of Technology (NIT) Srinagar has launched a national-level Artificial Intelligence challenge aimed at developing machine translation technology for Kashmiri, seeking to bring the language into India’s rapidly expanding AI and Natural Language Processing ecosystem. Named KATHE 2026: AI Challenge for Kashmiri Language Translation, the competition is being organised by Gaash Lab at NIT Srinagar in collaboration with the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), with the University of Kashmir as academic collaborator and GitHub as the primary sponsor. The challenge focuses on developing English-to-Kashmiri machine translation models, with participants required to build, test and evaluate AI models on the Kaggle platform. The competition will culminate in an offline finale at NIT Srinagar on August 21, where shortlisted teams will demonstrate their AI models through live evaluation. The winning teams will be felicitated at the conclusion of the finale for their contributions to English-to-Kashmiri machine translation.