AI Mission to have Centres of Excellence with mandate of application-based research: Vijay Raghavan

The national Artificial Intelligence (AI) Mission will have centres of excellence with a mandate of application-based research, Principal Scientific Adviser K VijayRaghavan said on Thursday.

Speaking at a webinar on AI organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), he said while machine learning and AI are very important, big data is at the core of it.

However, that data is not information, he stressed. Information, he said, is necessary to be processed from the data and converted to knowledge.

"But understanding is not sufficient and it must go into reasoned action," VijayRaghavan said.

He said AI approach has got extra-ordinary potential in multiple sectors but its adoption has primarily been driven globally from a commercial perspective.

The norms on geosaptial mapping, collecting of data, data portability have been relaxed, but there are also areas which are very important societally, he noted.

VijayRaghavan also mentioned key sectors where AI has enormous scope like healthcare, agriculture, education, smart cities, infrastructure, smart mobility and transport.

"To do this, AI Mission will now have centres of excellence. There will be a National Centre for Transformation AI and this will have a mandate of application based research. Private sector collaboration is a key part of that. Cloud compute facility is available on a large scale and there will also be moonshot projects of various kinds," he said.

VijayRaghavan also highlighted the barriers that need to be addressed.

He said there is an absence of enabling data ecosystems, adding that access to intelligent data needs to be handled in a manner which is both sensitive as well as available, high resource cost and low awareness for adoption of AI.

"People have no hesitations on looking at AI in looking at maps or ordering food but it has not become prevalent into decision-making structures, particularly in governments, Central as well as state. That needs to happen more," he said.