Artificial Intelligence has been touted as the most significant solution to many of the contemporary challenges. While it is no panacea, this technology of the Industry 4.0 is already showing a lot of promise to bring many of mankind’s struggles to an end. As with any other technology, the true potential of AI is unleashed when people who understand this magical tech use it for creating magic and a better society. With the 74th Independence Day of India drawing closer, let us take a look at some of the inspirational use cases of Artificial Intelligence.

• Undergraduate students are fighting Deepfakes with AI: Deepfakes are AI-generated videos showing real people doing and saying fictional things. General Adversarial Networks (GANs) are commonly used to generate deepfakes. Four undergraduate students from Nagpur: Atharva Peshkar, Atharva Khedkar, Rishita Mishra, and Yash Moharir, have developed Detectd, an AI-based deepfake detection platform that will allow anyone to verify the authenticity of the media they consume. The user can simply visit the website, upload a media file from his local system, whether a photograph or a video, which is then passed through a state-of-the-art model. The media is analysed for AI forgery to find out whether it is fake or not, and the results are returned to the user within minutes. Detectd emerged as the World Finalists and India Champions in Microsoft Imagine Cup 2021. Read more...
• Improving learning outcomes using low-cost AI technology: Class Saathi by TagHive is an AI-powered quiz platform and classroom clicker solution that aims to impact the world of education with its low-cost technology. The classroom response system is a combination of a clicker for each student and the offline app for the teacher’s smartphone. It is optimised to complement the existing infrastructure of a modest classroom without the need for computers, projectors, internet or even electricity. Learning continues for students at home with the AI-powered personalised learning app. The question recommendations and difficulty levels on the app are fine-tuned to the child’s aptitude and performance. Through partnerships with various state governments, they have recorded improvements in student performance and attendance. Read more...
• IIT Madras is building language technology for Indian languages: AI4Bharat, incubated in IIT Madras, fosters open-source innovation in building and deploying AI solutions to India's most pressing challenges. It is helmed by IIT Madras faculty members Mitesh Khapra and Pratyush Kumar. As a result of their efforts, they were able to release the largest corpus of Indian language texts and increase the size of corpus available by an order of magnitude in many languages. Further on, they’re focusing on the transliteration problem, which involves typing in a regional language using an English keyboard, by swapping text in predictive ways. The goal of this initiative is to bring parity in AI technology for Indian languages with English. Read more...
• Indian researchers use ML to create mortality prediction model for COVID-19 patients: Researchers from IIIT-H have developed an ML model for risk and mortality prediction of COVID-19 patients. A powerful combination of five features: age, neutrophils, lymphocytes, LDH, and hs-CRP, it has helped to predict mortality with 96% accuracy. From among the various models, the best performing method using XGBoost predicts mortality with an accuracy of 90% as early as 16 days before the outcome. Robust testing with three cases based on days to outcome confirms the strong predictive performance and practicality of the proposed model. A detailed analysis and identification of trends was performed using these key biomarkers to provide useful insights for intuitive application. Read more...
• An AI-powered backpack that helps the visually impaired navigate world: AI developer Jagadish K. Mahendran and his team have designed an AI-powered, voice-activated backpack that can help the visually impaired navigate and perceive the world around them. The system is housed inside a small backpack containing a host computing unit, such as a laptop. A vest jacket conceals a camera, and a fanny pack is used to hold a pocket-size battery pack capable of providing approximately eight hours of use. A Luxonis OAK-D spatial AI camera can be affixed to either the vest or fanny pack, then connected to the computing unit in the backpack. The OAK-D unit is a versatile and powerful AI device that runs on Intel Movidius VPU and the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit for on-chip edge AI inferencing. It is capable of running advanced neural networks while providing accelerated computer vision functions and a real-time depth map from its stereo pair, as well as colour information from a single 4k camera. Read more...

Image by Ramón Salinero on Unsplash