The second day of the GPAI Summit hosted a session on Applied AI Research and Indigenous Innovation which delved beyond the headlines and hype surrounding AI, offering a comprehensive and nuanced exploration of the field. The entire session was divided into 2 parts where in the first part top researchers from different institutes presented the latest developments in AI research thereby providing a comprehensive understanding of the latest happenings in the field. The second session wasn't just information sharing; it was a powerhouse panel where experts joined forces to illuminate the path for indigenous research and innovation in India. With the spirit of collaboration humming in the air, panellists discussed their collective best practices and strategies to build a thriving ecosystem where local knowledge takes center stage.

In the first session, Dr. Partha Talukdar, who is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google Research India spoke about four interesting dimensions of NLP research and achievements in India that have happened in the last decade. He stated that NLP research is a thriving research area in India with lots of work happening across research institutions, government laboratories, industry. He divided the research along 4 main dimensions i.e., pushing the frontiers of Sanskrit as a language, multilingual, knowledge and information and low data resource and ecosystem which is somewhat unique in the Indian context.

Dr. Richa Singh, Professor at the Dept. of CSE at IIT Jodhpur, presented the research of Indian academics in computer vision. She presented the research developments from four quadrants: basic research, user inspired, applied research and tinkering. Indian research has mostly focused on basic research like developing fundamental responsible computer vision algorithms and pure applied research tailored for specific problem statement. She outlined some of the success stories on 2 quadrants i.e., basic research and applied research. She spoke about responsible computer vision, bias and fairness and how different institutions are working towards creating and unbiased and fair computer vision framework.

Dr. Madhav Krishna, Professor at IIIT Hyderabad and Director of robotic research, summarized the research and development in robotics. He mentioned that a lot of startups have emerged in the robotics space including drones. He highlighted that in terms of vision as applied to robotics there is a lag of a couple of years.

Dr. Chetan Arora, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Delhi, spoke about use of AI from a healthcare perspective. He mentioned that India is still struggling to provide affordable, accessible and quality healthcare to its citizens. But the modern AI technique has the potential to transform the healthcare sector in India. He shared some success stories for example using AI to detect gallbladder cancer in an affordable manner. This initiative was undertaken in collaboration with PGI Chandigarh.

Session 2 saw presence of eminent panellists like Dr. Balaraman Ravindran, Professor, Department of CSE, IIT Madras, Dr. Parag Singla, Professor, Department of CSSE, IIT Delhi, Dr. Partha Pratim Chakraborty, Director, IIT Kharagpur and Dr. Chetan Arora. The session started off by stating that in the last few years multiple centres of AI have come up. Hence, it will be interesting to know what are the initiatives that have been taken and how the ecosystem can learn from them. The session started with each panellist highlight about their unit in AI in their respective centres. A common element across all the centers was that there was a need to cater to non-computer science students to diversify the students willing to take up a course in AI. The session was then opened to question and answers.