Intel India said it had partnered IIIT Hyderabad, Public Health Foundation of India and the Telangana government to unveil a research centre to focus on leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to solve India’s population-scale challenges in sectors such as healthcare and smart mobility.
The applied AI research centre, INAI, here will act as a catalyst to accelerate India’s leadership in AI while creating national assets such as curated data sets and computing infrastructure with the aim to attract global talent for high-impact research towards social sector development, Intel India said. In his address, Union IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said India was bound to be a robust player in AI application as data was the ‘oxygen’ for AI and India’s huge population, along with a robust digital ecosystem, was going to generate huge amounts of data.
He, however, added that the AI ecosystem must be kept free from biases. “AI has the great potential [for]of face recognition. But the facial recognition process should not show any bias of colour or ethnicity,” he reasoned.
Mr. Prasad also said the government was keen that data of Indians remained protected and “therefore, certain... standards are required to be laid down... there must be transparency in the algorithms... the details must be shared and there must be a trust element in this AI system”. Further, he stressed that users needed to be adequately informed about the purpose for which their data is being used.
Meanwhile, Nivruti Rai, country head, Intel India and vice president, Data Platforms Group, Intel Corporation said that with its unique strengths of talent, technology, data availability, and the potential for population-scale AI adoption, India had tremendous opportunity to lead human-centric applications and democratise AI for the world. the U.S. accounted for 16% of the global AI talent, followed by China (9%) and India (8%).
“Our goal is to make this 8% grow to 16% to 32%... because that’s the need of the hour,” she said. She also pointed that China accounted for 60% of investments that had been made globally into AI, followed by the U.S. (30%) and India (5%).
