NITI Aayog ink SoI with Google to help grow AI ecosystem in India

The NITI Aayog has signed Statement of Intent (SoI) with search engine giant Google to work together to foster growth for India’s nascent artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) ecosystem,

Key Facts

Under the aegis of this program, Google will train and incubate Indian AI startups in accelerator program. These startups will be mentored and coached by Google and its affiliates to enable them to better leverage AI in their respective business models.
Moreover, Indian researchers, scholars and university faculty will be funded to help bolster research ecosystem for conducting AI-based research. Further, Google will also bring its online training courses on AI to students, graduates and engineers to numerous cities across India, in form of study groups and developer-run courses.
Google will also conduct hands-on training programs to sensitise policymakers and technical experts in governments about relevant AI tools, and to use them for streamlining governance. Under this partnership, NITI Aayog and Google will jointly organize AI/ML hackathon that will be focused on solving key challenges within healthcare, education, agriculture, financial inclusion, transportation and mobility etc. This hackathon may use Kaggle, a global platform to help facilitate international participation into these planned hackathon challenges.

Background

NITI Aayog has been entrusted to setup national programme to conduct R&D in frontier technologies such as AI. In furtherance of this mandate, NITI Aayog has been developing India’s national strategy on AI along with National Data and Analytics Portal to enable wide deployment and use of AI.

Month: Current Affairs - May, 2018