Search engine giant Google started six Artificial Intelligence (AI) based research projects in India that would focus on addressing social, humanitarian and environmental challenges. The projects are in sectors like healthcare, education, disaster prevention and conversation.

"Each project is a collaboration between leading academic AI researchers and a nonprofit organization with expertise in the respective area, with support from Google researchers, engineers and program managers.

Google will provide funding and computational resources and also will support the efforts with expertise in computer vision, natural language processing, and other deep learning techniques," the company said in a statement.

"Whether it’s forecasting floods or detecting diabetic eye disease -- we’re increasingly seeing people apply AI to address big challenges. Therefore, we have made research in AI for Social Good one of the key focus areas of Google Research India -- the AI lab we started in Bengaluru last year in September," said Manish Gupta, Director, Google Research Team, India.

Team from IIT Delhi led by Tavpritesh Sethi, team from Singapore Management University led by Pradeep Varakantham and nonprofit Swasti will work on the project on improving health information for high HIV/AIDS risk communities while researchers from IIT Madras led by Balaraman Ravindran and nonprofit Armman will use AI to predict the risk of expectant mothers dropping out of healthcare programmes, to improve targeted interventions and increase positive healthcare outcomes for mothers and their babies.

Dealing with the issue of conservation, a team from Singapore Management University led by Pradeep Varakantham and Wildlife Conservation Trust use AI to predict human-wildlife conflict in the state of Maharashtra to help inform data-driven policymaking. The team from Singapore Management University led by Arunesh Sinha and nonprofit Khushibaby will apply AI to help ensure consistency in how healthcare information is captured and monitored.

To help dam managers understand dam and barrage water releases in a better manner, a team from Nanyang Technology University and Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology & The Environment will use AI to build early warning systems that minimise the risk of disasters.

Team consisting AI4Bharat and IIT Madras led by Mitesh Khapra and Pratyush Kumar and Non-profit organisation Storyweaver is building an open-source input tools for underserved Indian languages to accelerate the publishing of openly licensed content.