The second Annual Artificial Intelligence for Information Accessibility Conference (AI4IA) organised by UNESCO’s Working Group on Information Accessibility was hosted online as artificial intelligence (AI) gains importance on global and domestic levels.
While addressing the conference, Abhishek Singh, CEO of the Indian government’s National E-Governance Division (NeGD) and mygov.in, said AI-based platforms worldwide were projected to add about 15-20 billion dollars by 2030 to the world economy. For India, he said the projected contribution to the economy would be “around 950 million dollars”.
“Given the strength that India has with regard to AI-related workforce, India is adequately poised to take advantage of the growth of AI. We are amongst one of the largest providers of the AI workforce. Globally, we are among the largest AI startup nations, building AI-based solutions for the world,” said Abhishek Singh.
In 2018, India released its National Strategy for AI (NSAI). The strategy prioritises capacity-building in professional and academic settings, and adding supercomputing systems to promote AI-based technology in the country.
Singh also emphasized that with the vast amount of data available in the country, we can contribute significantly to global AI tech research. “With any solution that is built and developed and deployed in India for all purposes will be re-usable in any other part of the world, and part of the strength comes from the huge data that we have- for any population that is given, the amount and the scale that is available with us, the amount of data analytics that can be built on that, and based on machine learning algorithms, AI solutions are built,” said Singh.
The conference itself was hosted on the Gather.Town platform, which allows every attendee to create an online avatar, and “walk” around the conference venue. Akin to a multi-topic conference in the physical world, the AI4IA Conference had multiple “Pavilions” where various speakers from across the world had uploaded pre-recorded lectures, and there were opportunities for interactive ‘live salon’ sessions’ and conversations with other attendees.
Source: indiaai.gov.in
