Hyderabad: Professor Gaurav Rana of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M), and former Chairman of Mobile Payments Forum of India (MPFI), said that India’s success story of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) stands as an inspiration and guiding light to emulate innovative solutions for in Artificial intelligence (AI) landscape.He delivered a keynote address on the first day of a two-day convention on AI Days-2024 with a theme AI for Society hosted jointly by Swecha, a non-profit organisation with multiple partners here on Saturday.
Elaborating on the challenges and hurdles that had come in the way of a vision and how different stakeholders, like policymakers, technocrats, telecom providers and banks’ have come together to co-create a working framework and environs, he said, “Facing challenging situations with a spirit of not giving up to deliver solutions with last mile impact is the takeaway lesson to learn and emulate from the success story of the UPI.”
“Innovators should take the spirit of how the UPI frameworks have been developed to come up with solutions to various problems with the help of AI,” he added. Deliberating in a penal discussion on the theme of AI in the service of society in the Indian context, Surendra Thipparaju, senior Director of Data and AI, Microsoft, Sunil Abraham, director Data Economy and Emerging Tech of Facebook (Meta), Raj Sattaluri (CTO, Tech Vedika), Sujit Jagirdar (CIO-T-Hub) and Usha Paliath (Startup Mentor, Angel Investor) democratisation of data with effective policy backup to enable AI-enabled tools and development to innovate solutions in different sectors using the AI.
The penal speakers also highlighted the need for the development of foundation models in the Indian context and the sharing of data and issues like privacy, security and the like associated with it. Besides, stressing the development of user cases and data sets in open source for AI-enabled solutions in a multi-cultural and multi-lingual country like India with rich diversity.
In the penal discussion on life sciences, Dr Thangaraj, former Director of CDFD dwelled deep into the issues related to genomics data, past-present and future challenges. Dr Venkatraman, director, CR Rao Institute, University of Hyderabad, highlighted using block chain for innovative solutions in the healthcare sector.
