Six working groups, which had been formed to mull the Indian government’s artificial intelligence (AI) roadmap, have submitted the first edition of their report, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said, adding that the report’s recommendations included public-private partnerships to make semiconductors for AI applications.
In addition to this, the PPP model would be leveraged to build so-called “GPU clusters”, masses of resource-intensive graphics processors that are used by AI applications. These clusters would be made available to Indian start-ups and researchers, Mr. Chandrasekhar said. The text of the report was not immediately published online.
Mr. Chandrasekhar said use cases for AI that the India AI initiative would look at spanned “agriculture, healthcare, education, fintech, security, and governance”.
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Mr. Chandrasekhar touted the India Dataset Platform, a planned “collection which will be among the largest and most diverse collections of anonymised datasets for Indian researchers and startups to train their multi-parameter models”. The Minister was referring to learning models that AI technology is ‘trained’ on, or programmed to learn from.
Robotics strategy
Mr. Chandrasekhar also spoke on the draft National Strategy on Robotics, which was circulated for public input in September. “In this new world, for competitiveness, cost-efficiency and computer vision, these are important in manufacturing,” Mr. Chandrasekhar said.
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“While robotics is a multidisciplinary technology that has the potential to transform and disrupt a wide range of sectors and industries, its adoption to date has been primarily driven by economic motivations,” the draft strategy says, arguing that robotics technologies used in manufacturing and other areas could have a significant impact by “reaping the benefits of deploying robotics at scale”.
The draft strategy recommends fiscal interventions to facilitate local manufacturing of robotics hardware, building of ‘demonstration facilities’ to test and show off technologies, and building capacity in the robotics sector. Mr. Chandrasekhar said that job losses due to manufacturing automation was an erroneous way of looking at robotics, arguing that quality assessment through computer vision, and efficiency were among the benefits of robotics in the sector.
