NITI Aayog’s mandate is to enable AI use in key, high gain sectors of social development – healthcare, agriculture, smart mobility, education and infrastructure.
with the vision of disseminating cutting-edge and innovative ideas in India’s development policy, fourth edition of NITI Lecture Series at Vigyan Bhawan today will focus on ‘AI for ALL: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence for Inclusive Growth’, read an official statement.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will attend the lecture series organised by NITI Aayog in which the key note address will be delivered by Jensen Huang, President and Co-Founder, NVIDIA Corporation.
Recollect that the ‘NITI Lectures: Transforming India’ was inaugurated by the Prime Minister on August 26, 2016 and since been held annually, featuring eminent speakers from across the world.
“With the use of computers to simulate human intelligence, AI amplifies cognitive abilities of humans, thereby solving problems where the complexity is too great, or the information is incomplete, or the details are too subtle and require expert training.”
Union Budget-2018 mandated NITI Aayog to come up with a national programme on employing Artificial Intelligence (AI) towards national development.
The policy think tank published National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence discussion paper in June 2018. The Strategy lays down the vision of India for evolving a robust ecosystem for AI research and adoption. In line with the Government policy of Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, the Strategy is termed #AIForAll as it is focused on ‘leveraging AI for inclusive growth’.
In order to demonstrate impact of AI, multiple pilot projects have been launched in the areas of precision agriculture, creating AI led healthcare solutions, and bridging India’s diversity of languages by creating a digital ‘Ek Bharat, Shrestha Bharat’ platform using Natural Language Processing (NLP) which is a system of protocols which allow machines or computers to understand and interact with human speech and symbols.
NITI Aayog has signed Statements of Intent (SoI) with industry leaders such as Google, Microsoft and IBM to leapfrog India into the global arena of future technologies and enable use of artificial intelligence in key, high gain sectors of social development – healthcare, agriculture, smart mobility, education and infrastructure.
NITI has identified barriers which include lack of expertise, absence of enabling data ecosystem, high resource cost and low awareness, privacy and security issues and absence of collaborative approach to adoption and application of AI.
Recognising the importance of research and its commercial adoption in success of AI, NITI has also proposed setting up of Centre of Research Excellence (CORE) to focus on developing better understanding of existing core research. Besides this, the strategy paper also recommends setting up of International Centres of Transformational AI with a mandate to develop and deploy application-based research in collaboration with private players.
Union Ministers, policy makers, experts from different walks of life along with NITI Aayog Vice Chairman, Members, CEO and senior officials will be a part of the Lecture Series.
“Through the lectures, NITI Aayog has been bringing policy makers, academics, experts and administrators of global repute to India to enable learning, both at the Centre and States, from successful development practice world over.”
The first key note address – ‘India and the Global Economy’ – was delivered by the Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore, Shri Tharman Shanmugaratnam. Bill Gates, Co-Founder, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation delivered the Second lecture on ‘Technology and Transformation’ on November 16, 2016 and on May 25, 2017, Dr. Michael Porter, the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard Business School, delivered the Third Transforming India Lecture, titled ‘Competitiveness of Nations and States: New Insights’.