Zettamine Technologies – a Big Data Consulting and Analytical Solution Building Service provider; in association with the NIT, Warangal and Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, (MeitY), Government of India; hosted a program to launch ‘Applied Artificial Intelligence’ certificate course. Ms Karuna Gopal, President Foundation for Futuristic Cities & BJP leader; was the Chief Guest on the occasion, also present were Dr. Somayajulu, Director IIIT Kurnool; Dr. Bhat Dittakavi, IIT Hyderabad; Dr. Ravindranath, Professor, JNTU Kakinada and Mr. Surya Putchala, CEO Zettamine Technologies.
Speaking on the occasion Ms Karuna Gopal said, “Today around the world, Building AI Research Capacities, Developing AI Technologies and understanding specific application areas is being seen by nations as a critical element in a country progress towards national competitiveness and economic strength. The British government estimated that AI could add $814 billion to the UK economy by 2035. The UAE believes that AI will help boost the country’s GDP by 35 per cent and simultaneously reduce government costs by 50 per cent and in pursuit of this it has created a separate Ministry for Artificial Intelligence. In the last two years alone, several countries and regions have announced their AI strategic plans, which they view as very relevant in the current scenario and to match the present realities.
Ms Gopal said, the focus areas of AI for different nations depends on their realities, their prorities and the economic models, they are pursuing. The National AI strategies of some countries and their focus areas are
· USA & China – Defense & Military
· UK- Healthcare
· South Korea & Canada – R&D
· India – Inclusive growth – Agriculture / Healthcare / Education
Highlighting on India’s focus, Ms Karuna, as part of the ‘Precision Agriculture’ initiative, the government has initiated a proof of concept pilot in 15 districts in India to use artificial intelligence based real-time advisory based on satellite imagery, weather data, etc., to enhance the farm yields, especially in areas where the farm production levels are low. In the Healthcare arena, to overcome the dearth of Pathologists and Radiologists – as they are very few in numbers in India relative to the overall population, especially in rural areas; these applications can be augmented through image recognition AI. In Education field, through ‘Indian Languages Project’, India initiated a long-term project to build a complete natural language processing platform for Indian languages. This would aid in the development of several applications, like career counseling through chat bots and assistants, conversing in 22 Indian languages, translation services etc.
Elaborating further, Ms Gopal said, AI in India is all set to succeed for the following 3 reasons:
- Govt of India’s vision and its AI Policy with investments, Digitization
- Exiting ecosystem – IT companies / trained personnel / startup ecosystem
- Bangalore is good at deep tech like robotics or research; Hyderabad being good at data and AI training; Mumbai being good at BFSI and Delhi for agriculture and government.
- Diversity and scale – India’s diversity, range of complexity will give ample opportunity to achieve not only India’s goals but also of the World.
The ‘Certificate Program in Applied Artificial Intelligence’ will encompass, AI methods, techniques and tools including Predictive Analytics, Machine Learning, Deep learning, Neural Networks, Natural Language Processing. Domain exposure and Case studies.
