Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making waves with its capabilities in almost every industry, helping in the collection and dissemination of large reams of data. Over the last decade, we’ve embraced the technology in a huge way – but there continue to be certain glaring apprehensions around its exploitation for nefarious acts. However, a non-profit and applied institute like Wadhwani AI serves as a beacon of hope, with its revolutionary work in AI to improve the lives and livelihoods of people in the global south. 

Currently operational in India, Wadhwani AI is at the forefront of this digital transformation with 20 AI projects across healthcare, agriculture (food systems), climate and education. Most of their AI projects are in alliance with governments and non-profits, where their responsibility is to establish AI Centres of Excellence or AI Units within the partner organisation to get access to problem statements, data and deployment pathways. This enables them to build AI at scale to tackle development challenges. 

At present, Wadhwani AI includes four AI Units with central government ministries in India and the demand is on the rise. Their prediction is to be involved in over 80 AI projects in 2027, and have 10 AI Units across India. 

Read on to know more about how Wadhwani AI is making big strides in various industries. 

Creating an impact 

As mentioned above, Wadhwani AI dabbles in healthcare (maternal and child health, infectious diseases, telemedicine, and more); agriculture and climate (agristack, multiple national level open-source projects to provide datasets, libraries, and AI/ML models for the ecosystem); and education (reducing school dropouts, ensuring foundational literacy and learning). 

All these projects are in collaboration with government ministries including the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, National Health Authority, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer Welfare and National Skill Development Corporation, among others. 

Wadhwani AI’s vision is to reach 100 million people this year along with greater scientific discovery, building global digital public goods and augmenting grassroots programmes, among other initiatives.

For the greater good 

It’s time to dive deep into the various domains that Wadhwani AI is involved in.

Healthcare 

In the case of healthcare, there are several projects operational in clinical decision support to improve the quality of care to ensure that patient outcomes and physician experience is of the highest level. Dermatology is another area where a high-quality AI solution has been developed for diagnosis of skin issues for healthcare workers and medical practitioners. The programme involves taking an image of the infected site along with collation of some preliminary information to evaluate the issue. 

There’s also an AI-based computer vision solution to interpret and evaluate chest X-rays that can be leveraged by radiologists and chest specialists. In the area of ophthalmology, projects are underway to develop computer vision based solutions to detect diabetic retinopathy and corneal opacity, thereby minimising the chances of visual impairment. 

Most of us are already aware of how cancers are turning into an epidemic. Early diagnosis is the only solution to curb its spread, which is why an AI-based solution has been created to screen patients who are at high risk or show any signs of oral cancer, through images taken via smartphones. 

Apart from these pertinent projects, efforts are underway in the area of cardiology to predict the early onset of cardiovascular diseases as well as a solution for TB called Cough Against TB, an AI-powered screening tool that uses solicited cough sounds in addition to self-reported data by patients. In addition, there are a few more solutions for TB to reduce massive damage in such patients. 

Newborn babies is another group that faces a myriad of health issues, including low birth weight. When babies have low birth weight, they are more prone to infections, hypothermia and in severe cases, mortality. To address this, there are AI models that can accurately measure the weight of newborns (0–42 days) from a short video taken on a basic smartphone in community settings. This video is also used to measure 

anthropometric parameters such as height, chest circumference, and head circumference.

It’s not just the babies but also pregnant mothers who require adequate care. That’s exactly why it is critical to identify high risk pregnancies at an early stage to avert possible complications for mother and child during later stages.

Agriculture

Research suggests that nearly 55% of India’s population depends on agriculture for their livelihood. This makes it essential for brands and organisations to create AI-based tools to simplify the tedious tasks and enhance innovation. 

Wadhwani AI has established an AI Unit in the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer Welfare to execute initiatives to build the digital and data infrastructure for the agricultural ecosystem. Under this, there are a few initiatives that help in tech-based crop classification, crop mapping, crop surveillance, yield estimation, drought analysis, crop insurance and more. But how? Through large datasets that are collated from crop surveys, ISRO and the Indian Meteorological Department. 

Another well-thought-out model is to detect and classify pests in cotton farms. Wadhwani AI’s vision is to eventually build an open-source and annotated dataset of plants, crops, pests and plant diseases. 

That’s not all — agriculture monitoring is an equally pertinent area. This is being addressed by creating a suite of AI and ML solutions to monitor and track natural disasters, plant damage, pest infestations and everything else that may be of interest to the agricultural sector. 

Wadhwani AI is also involved in improving query solutions on the Krish Call Centre, a PAN India farmer helpline. What’s more, efforts are also underway to recommend more appropriate and fair mandi prices. 

In a positive move, there are close to 20 smartphone applications offered by the Ministry of Agriculture across agriculture, horticulture and animal husbandry. With the assistance of Wadhwani AI, plans are to integrate 

speech-to-text, local error correction, and image classification AI/ML models into frontline smartphone applications to improve the adoption and user experience.

Education 

Like many other areas, education was majorly affected during COVID-19 even though alternate channels of online learning sprouted in a short period. However, this period saw increased school dropouts as well as gaps in learning, thereby increasing the inequality of education in the country. 

Wadhwani AI, through its Oral Reading Fluency programme aims to analyse the audio of students reading selected paragraphs and identifying various elements. This can happen with the integration of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model, which will convert the speech to text, and which will then help gather elements such as reading speed, accuracy, words read correctly, words read incorrectly and additional words read. 

This also has a pause analyzer model that will help collate insights on the elements of fluency related to intonation. The vision is to build accent-inclusive models across critical age groups for English and regional languages, including Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi and Tamil.

Moreover, with so many school dropouts today, it is essential to reintegrate them into the education system seamlessly. Through Wadhwani AI’s Early Warning System, data collected by various state governments on schemes and programmes can be leveraged to identify those students that have a high risk of dropouts. Accordingly, schools can devise strategies to prevent this scenario. Currently, they already receive data from Educate Girls, while the arrangement with UNICEF and the state of Gujarat will soon begin. 

Looking into the future 

Apart from these ongoing projects, Wadhwani AI has several projects in the pipeline to tackle the spread of tuberculosis, genomic analysis of the gut microbiome, heat stress in rural communities in India and Indonesia, financial inclusion and monitoring the effects of climate change. 

While the journey has begun, it is important to take a step-by-step approach to reach the destination. Wadhwani AI is on the right path, it’s only a matter of time when the impact will be clearly visible.