As we welcome the new decade, the Government of Telangana and all our partners have been busy ushering in 2020 with focus on AI.
I am glad to see the AI leadership coming together today in Hyderabad, to celebrate Telangana’s Year of AI. Glad to see academicians, industry leaders, local and national startups, representative from the Norwegian Embassy, there is representation from all stakeholders of the AI ecosystem all under one roof.
Many of you have cut short your vacations and your teams worked during the holiday season to make this happen. I appreciate your passion and commitment for AI and thank you all for extending your valuable support to Telangana’s Year of AI initiative. I promise you that these MoUs and partnerships will be implemented in letter and spirit and will certainly lead to positive outcomes that would enrich businesses and will have positive societal impact.
Well, you are aware that we have launched our ICT Policy in the year 2016 and our vision is to be a leader in emerging technologies. We have identified 8 emerging technologies that includes – AI / ML, Blockchain, Cloud, IoT, Robotics and we have adopted a razor like focused approach in each of these technologies. We formulated policy frameworks for Blockchain, Drones, Cyber Security, e-Waste etc. and to give you an example, today Telangana is ranked as one of the top States in Blockchain in terms of adoption by the government and on the presence of the ecosystem.
Artificial Intelligence can address complex problems beyond the capability of traditional methods and AI holds significance for the government for its potential to transform citizens’ lives. A NASSCOM report says that Artificial Intelligence industry in India will be US $16 billion by 2025, from the current US $2 billion and is expected to generate 800,000 jobs in India by 2021. In
The Line with our vision and our approach, AI will be our focus for the coming year and beyond. While we are calling 2020 as the Year of AI, this event today will set in motion a set of initiatives, which will potentially make the next decade as Telangana’s decade of AI. Telangana is ready to capture the global AI opportunity.
As you all know, NITI Aayog came out with the National AI Strategy Paper in 2018, which focused on how India can leverage AI not only for economic growth, but also for social inclusion. The strategy aims to focus on research in sectors that can maximize economic growth and social impact, namely, Agriculture, Health, Education, Smart Cities and Infrastructure, Smart Mobility and Transportation. The strategy also emphasizes funding core and applied research and flags important issues like ethics, bias and privacy issues relating to AI.
Telangana, having established itself as a pioneer in IT and innovation, is quick to adapt to the needs of the rapidly transforming AI industry. In line with the national strategy, Telangana has decided to take on a focused approach for AI and take it to the next level, setting an example for other States to follow suit.
Over the last few years, Hyderabad has placed itself on the global IT map by not only attracting leading IT companies but also taking IT to the deeper roots of the society. Now Hyderabad is no more a destination for software services alone but has become home to product development, R&D and engineering centers and about half of the 50,000 employees working in the IT sector work in non-IT Services. Many organizations are already using AI either for their internal processes or for developing AI solutions and products for other clients. Some of the best names in the world have made Hyderabad the base for some of their most critical global operations.
The robust ecosystem of Global Enterprises, Research centers, Academia, MSMEs and start-ups is the reason for Hyderabad’s success in innovation. The rich talent available in Hyderabad is a key factor for the enormous growth of IT. Our efforts in AI will take forward this legacy and add on to Telangana’s growth story. In fact, the aim is to establish Hyderabad as amongst the Top 25 Global AI Innovation Hubs.
To achieve this goal, just like we did for other emerging technologies such as Blockchain and Drones, we organized a Roundtable in Hyderabad last month to formulate Telangana’s own strategy framework. The following 6 key pillars of the state’s strategy framework were identified and deliberated upon:
The first and foremost pillar is ‘Creation of Datasets and developing a Data Exchange Platform. As we all know machine readable data is the core of any AI/ML algorithm. Without data, machine learning algorithms would be stuck in an AI winter and would be confined to academics without real world applications.
Realizing that availability of quality data would be a key differentiator, we had launched the open data policy and published data related to about 20 departments on the open data platform and Hyderabad was the first to come out with mobility datasets in 2018 in partnership with Intel and IIITH
The aim going forward is to democratize seamless availability of data by creating population scale curated public data sets, especially in the areas of Mobility, Healthcare, Agriculture and e-Governance, leading to better innovation, governance and successful business outcomes. The State would be a nationally and globally recognized resource center for data sets and algorithms from and for India, with a mechanism to make these available for research & innovation, create – India AI Data Trust.
The second important pillar is making the required infrastructure available as deep learning algorithms require high computing power to train new AI algorithms and models. Access to such infrastructure is a big entry barrier for MSMEs and start-ups trying to build capability in these Advanced AI areas. Also, this would drive core or the fundamental research. Other countries are in fact setting up super computing infrastructure. So, we would plan to make available a high-Performance AI Computing (HPAIC) Infrastructure to startups and research centers by entering into technology partnerships with the industry and academia.
Availability of quality talent pool is critical for the success of any technology ecosystem and is a big differentiator, especially in the field of AI. The NASSCOM report predicts that there would be need of about 230,000 Data Scientists and AI jobs in India. And there would be 19 different job roles in AI.
We have premier institutes such as IIITH, IITH and BITS offering various programmes ranging from short term courses to undergraduate and graduate programs in AI. Additionally, TASK is offering Faculty Development Programmes, theme-based hackathons and certification programmes in Applied AI. Data preparation or annotation and engineering tasks account for more than 80% of the time involved in most AI and machine-learning projects, so there is huge opportunity in this area, primarily in the AI back office operations. These can be carried out in tier2 and tier3 cities. The third pillar, which is developing talent, aims to train 30,000 students in AI/ML/DS and Deep Learning in the next three years.
Governance, Ethics and Privacy would be the fifth pillar of our framework. While we understand the benefits of AI that can transform lives and businesses, we also would like to address the risks associated with A.I The rapidly growing capabilities and increasing presence of AI-based systems in our lives raise concerns on the impact, governance, ethics, and accountability of these technologies around the world. We would like to harness the potential of AI systems while ensuring that they do not exacerbate existing inequalities and biases, or even create new ones. We plan to develop a governance framework in key sectors and set up an advisory council on the ethical use of data and further develop guidelines that would help to organizations implement practices and measures in the model framework.We would be happy to contribute to the national framework of ethical guidelines too.
Next comes Research and Innovation – Countries across the globe are investing heavily into AI research. For ex Singapore, China have already invested heavily in AI, we may not be able to match their investments, but we need to find out innovative ways to increase funding in research. NITI Aayog in its strategy paper also identified two areas – Core or fundamental research and applied research.
Government would play a key role in promoting a high impact research focused on solving national-level societal problems around healthcare, Agriculture, smart mobility, climate change and E-Governance. We would like to develop human capacity in advanced AI technologies aimed at solving India specific problems by attracting talented researchers across the world to work at our Research Centers. We would provide an institutional framework to develop advanced algorithms and IP generation in the focus areas or domains. Government would also continue to support Govtech innovation by startups by procuring emerging technologies solutions from them. We have startups who are moving to Hyderabad because of the ecosystem present here and because the Telangana Govt is acting as the primary buyer or the first customer for emerging technologies, including AI.
The last pillar is Enabling AI Adoption and Community Collaboration – The state is already leading the way globally for ‘Government-as-a-buyer’ for AI which is also Transforming public service delivery and governance with deep technology. This is already attracting top talent and innovators to shift their base to Hyderabad. The government will also be working to ‘Industrialize AI’ by encouraging Industry adoption of AI solutions through co-Innovation of solutions with Start-ups.
As mentioned above, we aim to solve national-level societal problems around various domains such as Healthcare, Agriculture, Mobility, e-Governance and Climate Change. Out of these, substantial work is being done in Healthcare and Mobility.
We are happy to announce our partnership with NASSCOM, for Implementing the state’s strategy. We will be hiring a dedicated team to assist in operationalizing Telangana’s AI initiatives. We will set up a high level advisory council, some of the industry and academia representatives present here may be part of this council – Nivruthi, Vishal from NVIDIA, Prof Desai former director of IITH, PJN – Director of IITH, Murthy, Director of IITH, and other eminent personalities present here to associate themselves with the council.
To conclude, the Year of AI will seed the multi-year AI initiative and set the ball rolling for the coming decade.
Our primary goals are to Attract and Enable ~200 AI innovators / start-ups leading to a valuation of USD 3-4 billion to build their base in Hyderabad, Educate and Attract top AI talent from across the globe to work on critical areas as determined by the industry and government and Enable Government and key Industry verticals to leverage AI and deliver public transformation contributing an additional 1% to Telangana GDP
Finally, I would like to reinforce that the premise of Telangana’s AI is for social good. We would ensure that AI should serve humanity and the common good while enforcing fundamental rights such as privacy, equality, fairness and democracy.
Thank you all once again for your support and faith in us. Wishing you a great year ahead.
