IIT Madras faculty launched a platform on Wednesday to accelerate Artificial Intelligence (AI) innovations in India as well as provide solutions to address real-world challenges in the country.
The platform—AI4Bharat—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, NDTV quoted an IIT Madras statement as saying.
The platform is founded by Dr Mitesh M Khapra and Dr Pratyush Kumar, assistant professors in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Madras.
“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,” Dr Kumar said while speaking about the role of AI in today’s context.
“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.
“Our immediate goal is to create a community of 100 selected AI experts and 50 domain experts,” Dr Khapra said, adding that the platform is also open to enthusiastic students who will be mentored to solve problems.
