Ever since India began its ascent as a technology services hub, one state has been synonymous with that success – Karnataka. The Southern state houses India’s Silicon Valley Bangalore, which has nurtured the growth of technology giants like Infosys and Wipro, and more recently, has fostered the meteoric rise of startups in India. Today, Bangalore is home to some of the biggest ecommerce and technology ventures like Flipkart, Byju's, Myntra and Inmobi – and has been at the forefront of nurturing and implementing cutting edge technologies like AI and robotics.

What has made the state a leader in fostering a strong technology ecosystem is sound governance that has constantly believed in harnessing technology to make the state a global hub for business in recent times. It is widely believed that thanks to reforms introduced by erstwhile Chief Minister SM Krishna that the state has gained acclaim nationally and globally as a tech hub; and consequent governments have capitalized on these measures since.

So let’s take a look at how Karnataka has been implementing and introducing measures to accelerate AI development and adoption:

Timber Production Analytics

Timber is a leading source of revenue for the Karnataka Forest Department, but there were no measures to predict or preempt revenues or insights into the sale process. Along with NASSCOM CoE DSAI, KFD shortlisted 60+ shortlisted B-Tech Start-ups and AI innovators from across Karnataka to identify and finalize AI machine learning analytics vendors with custom solution with 5 years historic data on 1,400 registered bulk purchasers, which include sawmills and companies. Nine lakh tons of lots of timber sales data from 2013 to December 1, 2018 were analysed, churned and deep learning algorithm deployed to identify forecast quantity of wood required, type of wood by seasons, customer or buyer behaviour, price behaviour, species behaviour, class of timber fetching the best rate, best time to dispose timber and disposal.

Intelligent Visualisation for Pollution Control

The Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB) wanted to identify relevant solution providers in the AI and IoT space to provide “One View” air quality monitoring that would span a particular geographic area. Utilising three years of historic data on air quality, and levels of pollution across different regions, KSPCB deployed deep learning and ML to analyse area-wise air pollution, weather, moisture levels to understand pollution patterns better.

Setting up a Center of Excellence for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence

In conjunction with NASSCOM, K-tech set up the NASSCOM Center of Excellence for DS & AI in Bengaluru in 2018. This initiative is aimed at harnessing the best of technologically-advanced solutions spanning healthcare, retail, automotive, energy, education, mobility and governance.

Home Delivery During COVID19

The government launched the Homeline app to discourage citizens from stepping out to buy essentials. The app was made available in July, and the Whatsapp chatbot was manned by employees of [24]/7.ai. It mapped 16,000 grocery, medical, vegetable and fruit vendors

Locating Hospital Beds For COVID19 patients

Bengaluru’s municipal body BBMP was set to launch an app that would utilize AI to easily detect COVID19 patients anywhere in the city of Bengaluru, and direct them to a nearby hospital.

AI Enabled Movable Hospitals

In August, medical education minister K Sudhakar launched an AI-enabled movable hospital pod to treat COVID patients, especially in far-flung rural areas.

ARTPARK for AI innovation

ARTPARK, the brainchild of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), was announced by the Dept of Science and Technology (DST) to be set up in Bengaluru with the support of the Karnataka government to foster industry-wide collaboration on AI and other related technologies.