How Artificial Intelligence Will Drive The Future Of Engineering

Artificial intelligence has made its way into consumer and business lives, and it is poised to transform how the world functions in the years to come. AI could turn out to be the next key element for the economic development of India.

Earlier this year, the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (IIT KGP) launched the Centre of Excellence for Artificial Intelligence (AI). They have now been conducting several outreach programmes to bring the younger generation of engineers to venture into new technologies in this domain. The programmes will be focused on the challenges and applications.

Full Utilization of AI

Owing to extent of digital penetration in the country, adapting to AI on a large scale and for the mass is quite possible in India. The IIT KGP and Bengaluru had organised a marathon weekend on AI which was done to bring together industry experts, researchers, and entrepreneurs. This was done to get insight details as these people are engaged in cutting-edge developments in AI or are making use of AI applications in their field of work. AI can be used to address challenges in healthcare, agriculture and skilling among others.

AI Summit organized by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Centre for AI at IIT Kharagpur, campus researchers and industry experts gave demonstrations of how AI was being used in their respective fields -- be it retail, banking, healthcare, transport or education.

Societal Problems

AI can be used to solve socio-economic problems by implementing data enabled technologies. Close to 1,100 budding engineers from these two cities delved into the following challenges:

-Illiteracy

-Hunger disease

-Natural disasters

-Speech recognition

-Advanced transportation

-Consumer behaviour

-Market analytics

With India’s huge talent pool and its proven ability to scale up new technology, the country stands to benefit from AI in a big way. The AI revolution can also benefit greatly from India. The country’s diversity of languages, dialects, accents, scripts, dress, and culture presents a rich set of challenging problems for artificial intelligence.