New Delhi, May 8: The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur deputy director Manindra Agrawal has announced that the Institute will be establishing a research centre for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT). This will be dedicated for carrying out research and teaching in modern concepts of various technologies.
IITK to fortify undergraduate programmes
The proposal was at the discussion stage and would materialise soon, informed Agrawal, who is also a professor in the IITK Department of Computer Science and Engineering. The institute is already offering few programmes in AI and related topics at the undergraduate (UG) level that are very much popular among the students. He told that further fortification would be done of these streams.
For the development of indigenous blockchain architecture, a central cybersecurity agency engaged the IIT in 2018. The Office of the National Cyber Security Coordinator commissioned the project for creating a blockchain platform for application in e-governance. Sandeep Shukla, a fellow IITK faculty member, and Agrawal were the chief executors of the project.
As per an analysis by research firm Itihaasa, India stands at the third position when it comes to quality AI research publications, and it still lags behind top-ranked China and the second-ranked US. India has 12,135 documents, behind China and the US with 37,918 and 32,421 documents, respectively.
After the analysis was done on the basis of ‘citations’ parameter, it was found that India stood at the fifth position, behind the United Kingdom, Canada, USA and China. This suggested that upgradation needs to be done in the quality of AI research and output in the country.
The Infosys co-founder and former CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan founded agency had calculated the number of ‘citable documents’ on Artificial Intelligence during 2013-17 as listed out by Scimago, which is a compendium that collects and combines trends in the scientific research publications.
In 2018, NITI Aayog, the federal think-tank, had also released a discussion paper regarding the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence in India. It revealed that around US$ 1 trillion could be added by the country to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by the integration of AI applications with its economy.
IITK’s involvement with ISRO, DRDO
IITK has had also been involved in the new age semiconductor devices that could be used by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in indigenous space exploration. For similar cutting edge projects, the Institute also worked with Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).