Collaboration Needed Between Govt, Academia, And Industry To Build AI Ecosystem: AI-Preneurs Panel
The eminent panelists from industry, government, and academia at The Rise of AI-Preneurs” said that India needs collaboration and integration of public and private sector supplemented by efforts of highly qualified academia to harness the immense potential and develop the Artificial Intelligence ecosystem.
The webinar was organized by TechArc, leading technology analytics, research, and consultancy firm in association with Compass IDC, the overseas development centre of Urban Compass Inc., a US-headquartered technology platform dealing with the inculcation of new-age technologies such as AI and ML within the real estate industry.
Joseph Sirosh, Global CTO, Compass, Inc., said, “I have been working with AI for over 3 decades now and there has never been a time as exciting as now, both in theoretical and practical terms. We've come a long way from AI being purely dedicated to machine learning on structured numerical data and being significantly limited by data availability. Deep Learning and pre-trained systems like Transformer Networks have widened the application of AI to all types of unstructured data, including images, speech, videos, text and social network analysis, and natural language processing. AI has now invaded almost the entire digital realm accelerating automation across industries, creating meaningful user interactions, and leveraging valuable insights from transactions.”
The panel called for the democratization of research in AI and also discussed the power of huge data for developing ‘intelligence’ for organizations.
Anna Roy, Sr Advisor, NITI Aayog, said, “Industry and academia need to collaborate with the government with a long-term vision with regards to developing a robust ecosystem that addresses both the needs of basic research and domain-specific applied developments. Equally important is AI adoption where governments have a crucial role to play in developing policies which ease the adoption of AI.”
The panelists also unanimously agreed that India has immense potential to leverage AI and each sector is a huge opportunity in itself as India leaps ahead with Digital Transformation in the coming decade.
Dr. Nikhil Agarwal, CEO - FIRST & C3i Hub, IIT Kanpur, said, “The good news about the Indian Startup industry is that it has now become the third-largest country for startups & the best part about it is that a variety of them are driven by AI. We need to create awareness amongst people that AI is not going to replace us. All that AI will do is make things easier for us.”
Mausam, Head of School of Artificial Intelligence (ScAI) IIT Delhi, said, “The Indian AI industry still needs to catch up fast with the other aspects such as readiness, deployment & the number of AI researchers. The amalgamation of the right set of people, strong computing infrastructure, and the right data, together, can help build a strong AI. This will happen only through robust industry-academia collaboration.”
The event moderator Faisal Kawoosa, Founder & Chief Analyst, TechArc, said “In AI, everyone is solving problems and they have to invent solutions. Therefore, everyone working in AI is an entrepreneur as they are all inventing and innovating on a daily basis."
