IIT Madras : It will be a community of AI professionals, students, domain experts, policy makers and academicians collaborating on solving real-world challenges.
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) faculty is launching a platform, AI4Bharat, to build Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions to address India’s problems and accelerate innovation.
It will be a community of AI professionals, students, domain experts, policy makers and academicians collaborating on solving real-world challenge.
The areas of focus would be agriculture, healthcare, smart cities, Digital India and sustainability.
In a statement, IIT Madras says that the platform aims to harness demonstrated AI technologies to solve real-world challenges.
It is founded by Mitesh M. Khapra and Pratyush Kumar, assistant professors in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Madras.
Pratyush Kumar said that much of the research in AI today was driven by the problems of the West.
“For instance, building autonomous cars takes priority over building systems that can monitor the condition of rural roads. We need to change this by shifting the focus to India.
This is where domain experts and the government would play an important role-identify problems that are unique to India and can benefit from AI,” added Kumar.
This platform is also open for enthusiastic students and they will be mentored to solve problems.Mitesh M Khapra added that their immediate goal was to create a community of 100 selected AI experts and 50 domain experts.
The government, through its think-tank Niti Aayog, is already focusing on AI as a new-age technology.
The IIT Madras startup “One Fourth Labs” will work closely with AI4Bharat and offer basic and advanced courses in AI at affordable prices – as low as Rs. 1,000 for a five-month online course.
These courses are designed with the goal of imparting requisite skills for solving real-world problems.
Mitesh Khapra said that they would like to work closely with the government.”That is the only way to achieve impact at scale.
Much of the government funded research in AI today focuses on solving problems of tomorrow and is geared towards ambitious outcomes,” he added.
