The Chief General of the Indian Army, Mr. Bipin Rawat on Sunday 20.01.2019, at the National Conference on ‘Self Reliance in Defense Manufacturing’ gives a statement that it is high time to focus on incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data into the Indian Armed Force’s system. Further, he added that the nation’s northern rival, China was spending “huge money” on this technology.
Another news was also there that the CBSE (central board of Secondary Education) is going to form a plan to introduce Artificial Intelligence as part of the curriculum to the CBSE based school. Which gives an option to the class 8th, 9th & 10th students to elect artificial Intelligence as elective subjects.
NITI Ayog, a think tank Mr. Modi’s Government has announced a “National Strategy’ for the Artificial Intelligence in India will give an edge to India against the rest of the world. To promote the strategy it has also launched the #AIforall Initiative.
This all shows the importance of Artificial Intelligence for India & how crucial it will be to give an edge over the peers above the globe.
As per the Recent Study, India ranked Number 3rd in Artificial Intelligence learnings however it placed at Rank 18th in terms of current technology, AI and robotics.
Let’s find out what are the Opportunity & challenges due to Artificial Intelligence in India.
Artificial Intelligence as an Opportunity for India
Within the Era of Industrial Evolution 4.0 (read more about Industry 4.0) artificial intelligence is going to play the crucial role, it is an important pillar of industry along with Robotics, Data Science and Internet of Things. As per the recent study report in coming future only artificial Intelligence is going to cover the 30 percent of the world’s economy. Resultant many countries have already started adopting the technology in the manufacturing, health, businesses and other sectors as well.
So its time for India to adopt the Artificial Intelligence to kept pace with the global peers as it will impact the economy significantly as it is purported to increase productivity, increase employment opportunities and create wealth.
Soon with Robotics Nurses, surgeons, self-driven vehicles, cloud-based computing, automated robots workers and chatbots, our lives will soon be driven by AI.
In India major application is going to be in the sectors of Education, Manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, transport, Justice system, and governance. In all the way it is going to impact the masses primarily to serve the objective of betterment of living people by solving the nation’s biggest challenges and with the potential to emerge as a transformative technology.
It is going to be the job creator in future for India
With the application of Artificial intelligence in the various sectors it requires the workforce who are the expert in the fields of Mathematicians, coders, and statisticians too, and luckily on the workforce side, India has abundant engineering talent, which only needs to the channeled into a new direction. India produces such professional in large numbers across the country. This all shows that there is a huge opportunity in the field of machine learning and automation.
Further as per NASSCOM only that Indian IT industry will require 140,000 professionals with expertise in AI and data sciences by 2020.
AI going to play an important role to strengthen the Defence System:
AI-powered robots can travel across hazardous terrains, perform remote surgery, and most importantly execute surveillance missions without the involvement of humans.
Most of the world’s advanced technology is based on artificial intelligence i.e. Robots and gradually the entire defense industry is moving towards the integration of Artificial Intelligence in robots to provide advanced military applications. For example, the military has deployed unmanned autonomous vehicles for detecting anti-ship mines in littoral waters etc.
So does Indian army also going to venture into Artificial intelligence based military application, to kept in pace with global peers.
CAIR has been working on a project to develop a Multi-Agent Robotics Framework (MARF) for more than eight months now. MARF will equip India’s armed forces with an array of robots that can function as a team, in a fashion similar to what our soldiers do.
It will make our defense system stronger than ever.
Challenges
The biggest challenge in India for implementation of Artificial Intelligence in India is of shortage of Indian talent in this field, as per recent published story of quartz only 4 percent of AI professionals in India actually working on the cutting edge technology such as deep learning neural network which is a key ingredient to build AI related solutions.
This is fundamentally a grass root level problem, as roles in data engineering are the intersection of maths, statics & programming and currently in Indian education system it is not taught as formal learning.
Few academic institutions like the IIT Kharagpur, IIT Kanpur, IIIT Hyderabad have specialized disciplines in Statistics and Information Retrieval (sub-topics of AI only).
To concur this situation NITI Aayog has started a #AIforall Initiative, CBSE planning to incorporate Artificial intelligence as part of their curriculum.
But the things are improving now IIT Hyderabad is going to be the first college to introduce full-time B. Tec course in Artificial Intelligence and also having a course of M.Tec in Machine Learning.
Another Challenge is Data integrity & Security.
Most AI applications rely on huge volumes of data to learn and make intelligent decisions. Machine learning systems complete based on Data often sensitive and personal in nature, to learn from them and enhance themselves. This makes it vulnerable to serious issues like data breach and identity theft.
For instance Aadhar data misuse, currently a concern for India. So to maintain data privacy & security is going to be the biggest challenge for India.
Data Scarcity is also a challenge for India
It is true that organizations have access to more data today than ever before. However, datasets that are relevant for AI applications to learn are very rare in nature. The most powerful AI machines are the ones that are trained in supervised learning. This training requires labeled data to let machine learn and this Labelled data is limited.
Conclusion
India is well positioned to make the best of the opportunity that AI can presents, in terms of public welfare and the robust health of the economy. The next five years have been earmarked for pace and trend of AI adoption. The NITI AAYOG Report predicts that India will leverage AI as a ‘garage’ for emerging economies. This is a positive factor since it catapults India to the leadership position, both technically and normatively in determining future use cases for AI in India.
No comments