Artificial Intelligence has witnessed a sea change in 60 years. From the early 1950s, when it was first developed, the use was largely restricted to a computer lab. Soon, the technology started dominating research initiatives, made its way out of the lab and into tech companies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook, then non-technology companies began adopting it aggressively while startup too began exploring and democratising its use for the greater good. 

Today, you'll be hard pressed to find a single industry that doesn't use AI in some form or shape. For instance, the use of Computer Vision in retail, logistics, and autonomous driving is almost a given, as is the use of Machine Learning and Deep Neural Networks in supply chain, healthcare and education, while RPA is completely changing the landscape of traditional contact centres and BPOs. And the applications are getting multi-layered, multi-faceted and sophisticated. Traxcn's data reveals that there are upwards of 2,300 AI startups in India, spanning sectors like retail, logistics, SaaS and healthcare among others. In more recent times, enterprises are scaling their efforts to enhance revenue, limit opex costs, optimise resources and manpower for meaningful labour and deploy machines with intelligence to complete tasks with speed and high accuracy. 

Keeping in mind these dynamic forces that compel the industry to adapt, K-Tech CoE Data Science & AI launched a collaborative effort called Innovate2Build - a Co-Ideate, Co-Innovate, and Co-Create platform for enterprises to augment and accelerate their AI capabilities in partnership with innovators and academia to solve real world challenges. The process to get onboard this initiative is simple - if you're a startup developing an innovative AI-driven solution that seeks adoption or an enterprise seeking a specific AI solution, K-Tech Data Science & AI will facilitate an exchange with the aim to materialise a productive and mutually beneficial partnership. Furthermore, academicians too can be part of this platform to enable faculty become AI-ready and gain practical AI development experience.

Recently, students of IIM Bangalore’s Business Analytics & Intelligence (BAI) Batch 11 won a datathon that was conducted as part of the Innovate2Build initiative, in collaboration with NASSCOM & netwrk.ai. Students participated in the I2B challenge and built a component of the AI engine for the start-up netwrk.ai. The component of the AI engine will help the netwrk.ai platform in predicting the desired business results.

The hackathon project was initiated as an open invitation to data science students. Four teams were selected after initial evaluation. Two teams were selected from the four for the final round, which were Team AlphaReboot comprising Kalaiyarasan Venkatesan, Pratosha Hegde, Nirmal Ramrakhyani and R Jeya Sri, and Team KD comprising Sriram Subramoney and Kaumod Mishra.

These teams worked under the guidance of netwrk.ai, NASSCOM and IIM-B’s Data Centre & Analytics Lab (DCAL) for developing of the component of AI engine. At the end of the evaluation, Team AlphaReboot was selected as the hackathon winner based on the final delivery, the model design, a frontend for the business parameters and API for integration with the core platform. 

Innovate2Build aims to seamlessly bring together various factions of the innovation ecosystem to foster collaboration, creativity and solution building.

For details about Innovate2Build, click here