Regulations are often viewed as causing obstruction to anyinnovation process. However, if the associated challenges are rightly and timely addressed, the innovation process can be accelerated. Given this background, the esteemed panelists,which had a balanced representation from the government, academia and industry, explored the potential approaches that can be taken in a bid to put in place proper regulations for responsible AI. The session was moderated by Dr. Arghya Sengupta, Founder and Research Director, Vidhi Legal who craftly steered the discussion to focus on the various regulatory approaches. 

In his keynote speech, Mr. Brad Smith, President and Chief Legal Officer, Microsoft Corporation acknowledged the need for a national strategy based on a firm ethical cprinciple. He stated that Microsoft has already been working on responsible AI and have identified 6 principles in the process. They are fairness and unbiasedness, security and safety, privacy, inclusiveness, transparency and accountability. Nevertheless, as AI is rapidly advancing, we are increasingly becoming AI-based enterprises facing multiple challenges. Such challengesneed to be addressed by balancing the path between serving the people and following the fundamental value system. 

While expressing his view on striking that regulatory balance, Mr. J Satyanarayana, Chief Advisor, C4IR India, World Economic Forum, mentioned 5 ways of doing so: a) adopting a system of agile governance, b) creating a developmentary sandbox (which will test an algorithm for its output), c) establishing a set of ethical standard and principles, d) creating an index that measures the balance and e) beingresponsible by design.

Mr. Ralf Sauer, Deputy Head of Unit International Data Flow and Protection, laid emphasis on the fact that the way data is collected should have a human-centric approach as the concept of data protection is essentially based on the element of trust. 

Dr. Gulshan Rai, who is the former National Cyber security coordinator, repeatedly highlighted the several cases of abuse of the AI technology, both in India as well as abroad. He reiterated the need to put in place an AI framework that should be modular as well as scalable. He also identified the need to create a uniform definition of AI as well as set up an independent body to test the unbiasedness of any AI algorithm. 

Dr. Anand Rao, Global Artificial Intelligence Lead, PwC, focused on the trade-off between innovation and regulation and put forth a thought-provoking question by stating that are we using AI to displace humans or assist humans? Taking into consideration India’s demographic dividend, he voiced that India’s focus should be on assisted and augmented form of AIthat has a human-centered approach.

Dr. Vineeth Balasubramanian, an Associate Professor, IIT Hyderabad brought a research flavor to the discussion by stating that current research is mostly being done to address the explainability aspect of AI and a post-hoc and an ante-hoc models are mostly used in the process. He also added that since AI and ML are data-driven and lack human elements such as reasoning, common sense and background knowledge, it is important that these aspects are integrated in the process. He concluded by saying that there is a need to regulate not only the data but also the performance metric by which an AI is judged.