In an endeavour to develop Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions in India and accelerate AI Innovations, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras faculty has launched a new platform – “AI4Bharat”.
The official statement released by the Institute states that the platform will serve as the collaboration ground for community of AI professionals, students, policy makers, domain experts and academicians. Together they can work towards solving real-world challenges in different fields such as Agriculture, Healthcare, Digital India, Smart Cities and Sustainability.
It will be a community of AI professionals, students, domain experts, policy makers and academicians collaborating on solving real-world challenges in Agriculture, Healthcare, Smart Cities, Digital India and sustainability, said a statement from the Institute.
Launched on July 10, 2019 (Wednesday), the platform of ‘AI4Bharat’ eyes to make artificial intelligence related research focus majorly on India-centric problems, rather than west.
AI4Bharat is founded by Dr Mitesh M Khapra and Dr Pratyush Kumar. They are serving as Assistant Professors in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Madras.
Speaking about the role of AI in present context Dr Kumar said, “AI is one of the defining technologies of this age. However, much of the research in AI today is 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,” he added.
Highlighting the importance of building a community for AI, Dr Khapra said, “To solve such problems it is important to move AI research and development out of silos and create a platform where AI professionals can come together to design and build impactful solutions. With this in mind, our immediate goal is to create a community of 100 selected AI experts and 50 domain experts”.
Notably, the platform will also work with ‘One Fourth Labs’ to offer basic and advanced courses in Artificial Intelligence at affordable prices. They will be mentored to solve real-world problems.
