Institutes gear up India for age of artificial intelligence

The Indian workforce, academics and students are gearing up for the advent of the age of artificial intelligence (AI). According to the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), the country will require nearly 238,000 AI professionals in the next three years and the AI industry will be worth US$16 billion by 2025.

AI is a field that has a comparatively long history but continues to actively grow and evolve.

NASSCOM last month launched the programme titled ‘AI Foundation for Faculty Development’ to hone faculty's skills in AI at Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. In addition, some top institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, IIT Hyderabad and Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru are training students and faculty in AI.

According to NASSCOM, their programme will enhance the capabilities of faculty in AI by providing them with the necessary exposure to real-time business problems. The course will provide the participating academics access to the latest tools and technologies in the AI space and give them an opportunity to work closely with industry experts.

The trade body said the programme will be delivered as an integrated platform consisting of 125 hours of learning including about 100 hours of self-paced online learning in fields of programming languages, machine learning, predictive modelling, time series forecasting, natural language processing, optimisation techniques, visualisation, and image and video analytics.

The programme will be conducted through the trade body's Centre of Excellence for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, and Future Skills platform. The centre of excellence has been set up by the state of Karnataka with NASSCOM as its implementation partner with the aim to position Karnataka among the top five AI innovation centres over the next five years.

NASSCOM Future Skills is an industry-driven learning eco-system that aims to get India accelerated on the journey to building skills and becoming the global hub for talent in emerging technologies.

Amit Aggarwal, NASSCOM’s Future Skills chief executive, said: “As adoption of automation and artificial intelligence builds momentum across the world, people in India will have to upgrade their skills. Re-skilling and training of faculty is one of the critical drivers for this change.”

New initiatives

Earlier this year, IIT Madras faculty launched a start-up to catalyse knowledge of Indian students in AI with technology insights at nominal costs. Their start-up, One Fourth Labs, has an online school ‘PadhAI’ that provides India-specific courses on AI.

The start-up was established by Mitesh Khapra and Pratyush Kumar, assistant professors in the department of computer science and engineering at IIT Madras, and is nurtured by the IIT Madras Incubation Cell.

The course was launched in February this year. At that time Khapra had said in a statement that the Indian IT industry had gone through several waves of technology and survived by upskilling.

He said: “The current wave of AI is very different and it requires both mathematical insight and hands-on experience.”

Vikas Khare, an IIT Roorkee engineering graduate who plans to enrol for the course, said: "AI is fast transforming our lives. The skills that were once relevant are no longer going to be sufficient for a productive career and I'm sure this course will enhance my capacity and equip me for the jobs of future."

IIT Hyderabad has launched a bachelor of technology programme in artificial intelligence for the academic year 2019-20. The course will have an intake of 20 students who can take the programme via the Joint Entrance Examination – Advanced, which is an annual engineering college entrance examination in India conducted by the IITs.