The idea behind the research centre is to explore fair and ethical developemnt and use of artificial intelligence.
Google on Monday, December 19, announced that a $1 million grant will be provided to Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) for the setting up of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) research centre to explore fair and ethical development and use of AI. According to reports, Google is also to grant a similar amount to independent non-profit Wadhwani AI for development in the agriculture sector. “It is to develop efforts to deploy AI models that help with crop disease monitoring, predicting yield outcomes and bringing efficiencies to Kisan call centers,” Manish Gupta, Director of Google Research India, had told Indian Express.
Gupta had also said that Google would apply AI models over satellite images for identifying farm boundaries, locations of the farms and others.
Head of Robert Bosch Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBC-DSAI) at IIT-Madras B Ravindran told TOI that AI has been mainstreamed and utilised by government and other sectors, which has made ‘a multi-stakeholder approach essential’. “We will have technologists, sociologists, policy and legal experts initiating dialogue, building resources, and bringing out research on responsible use of AI,” he had said.
Google has already initiated a project called Vani to understand different languages, dialects and accents in India. “With our partner, the Indian Institute of Science, we are collecting speech data from each and every district of India. By collecting data in a region-wise manner, rather than based on language, we hope to basically cover the full linguistic diversity of India,” Gupta told Indian Express.
Further, Google Research is also working to digitise handwritten medical prescriptions. Speaking about this, Gupta said that there were many factors at play when a pharmacist deciphers a prescription. “What we have been doing is, instead of using any rules, looking at how AI could capture that kind of information to improve the accuracy of your handwriting recognition or OCR models,” he said.
Source: The News Minute