Technology and humanity seem to be the two aspects helping us sail through the current difficult times. On the same lines, the latest edition of AI Pe Charcha was organized on 30 April 2021, which focused on the state of AI in India and the world and its adoption in the Public Sector in partnership with Google. 

To remind you all, AI Pe Charcha is a series of panel discussions that endeavor to learn from the best AI practices worldwide with in-depth and informative knowledge sharing by various industry stalwarts, leaders, and researchers. 

This edition was hosted by Mr. Abhishek Singh, CEO MyGov; President & CEO NeGD; MD & CEO Digital India Corporation (DIC) at Govt of India. He expressed his gratitude to Google for providing a set of experts in the AI arena. He said, “more than ever the current situation requires AI to pitch in to provide the insights and help understand the COVID 19 curve”.

The panel discussion started with Dr. Manish Gupta, Director Google Research, India with his ideas on AI for proactive healthcare and with a focus on the current pandemic. He said preventive health, proper diagnosis, and timely action to take care of overall wellness and AI are making a big difference in healthcare.

Dr. Christine Robson, Product Lead for Machine Learning, Google AI, shared deep insights on the potential of machine learning and deployment of AI in a responsible way. Christine Robson is actively involved in building AI products like TensorFlow and Cloud AI at Google. She has been focusing on AI research around accessibility and is a globally acclaimed AI expert. She holds a Ph.D. in CS from UC Berkeley and Master’s and Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from MIT in EECS and Mathematics. She beautifully explained AI as the “science of making things smart.” 

Classification, Prediction, Generation, and Language understanding are the main areas where ML is showing great progress, added Dr. Christine.

Dr. Christine also threw light on Google Assistant, which understands 9 Indian languages with 20+ million daily users. She also touched upon BERT (a natural network-based technique for NLP pre-training), which powered the largest leap ahead for Google Search in 5+ years. In terms of the future of AI, she brought to light her ideas on small data, generative models, unsupervised and reinforcement learning, ML-tailored chips, language understanding, machine perception having applications in businesses, healthcare, science, music, and public services.

The session also had insights around investment by Google in India around AI. AI is being used to tackle big societal challenges in India and also encouraged more users to use ML. AI capabilities can be applied in sectors of healthcare (medical imaging diagnostics, predictive analysis for healthcare), agriculture (predicting crop yields, water conservation), governance (detecting tax evasion and improving G2C services), and environment (flood forecasting, wildlife conservation)

The next speaker in the session, Joshua Marcuse, Head of Strategy & Innovation, Global Public Sector, presented his thoughts on how public sector organizations can adopt and implement ML responsibly. He has an elaborate career with experience in the US Department of Dependence DoD and also had been ED of Defence Innovative Board. “At its core ML is a new way of creating problem-solving system,” said Joshua. According to Joshua, Enterprise ML is a change management process requiring internal alignment, technical confidence, and governance. He gave an explanatory idea around the typical flow to applying ML to any mission to make it easier for people to deploy more ML-based projects. As recommendations for deploying AI in the public sector, Joshua suggested that organizations should choose the right problem to solve, seed early wins with proven commercial techniques and outside support, work on problems with available data. He also added that artificial intelligence in public sector comes down to human intelligence along with a focus on the point that it is not only about innovation but innovation adoption.

The session also had immensely insightful information by Mr. Alok Talekar from Google Research on how Google AI is helping policymakers during COVID-19. The concept of "cohorting" was explained by him, which was highly relevant in terms of traveling in public transport during these critical COVID-19 stricken times.

The session was concluded by Mr. Aman Jain, who is Head of Government Affairs and Public Policy Google India, and Mr. Rajesh Sundaresan from IISc. They presented their ideas and talked about the AI-powered pilot projects run in India with Google.

The session was attended by many students and industry experts who also shared questions around AI and got elaborate explanatory answers. Such sessions strengthen the AI ecosystem with global involvement and idea exchange between industry experts on the virtual platform.

Image by motionstock from Pixabay