(Daily News Scan - DNS English) Artificial Intelligence
Important Points:
Artificial Intelligence i.e. Al has made its arrival in our lives. Recently during the month of February Kerala police started using robot for their work. Chennai had its first robot themed restaurant opened in 2017 and has come up with another this year. The specialty is that robots not only serve food but also interact with the customers in English and Tamil Surgery in India has also been conducted through this technology which became to be the first of its kind.
The term Al was first given by John McCarthy in 1956 at the Dartmouth conference. Actually, Artificial Intelligence is the intelligence exhibited by machines. Al is a branch of computer science that deals in the study of principles of intelligent behaviour and creates computational system that can work intelligently. In simple words it is a computer based system that perceives the environment and acts intelligent like humans. Virtual personal assistants like Siri and Alexa, Google search, smart cars, music and movie recommendations, purchase recommendation and online customer support are few examples of artificial intelligence used in our daily life.
A real and true artificial intelligence is the one which learns on its own that is getting smarter and enhancing its capabilities. Al can be categorized into various parts like weak and strong Ai, narrow and general Al and lastly super intelligence.
Al works by combining large data with fast, interactive processing and intelligent algorithms that allows the software to learn automatically. It has subfields like machine learning, deep learning, computer vision and NLP (Natural Language Processing).
There are various utilizations of Al. Information is quickly accessible through it. It has spread to various domains like law, political science, economics etc. Through machine learning people get suggestions online for their shopping and other activities. Even on television and other apps recommendations are given on the basis of past watched shows. Apart from that, on social media machine learning can be noticed. Facebook recognizes our image through its image recognition system.
Al is going to bring a lot of change in social sectors and health care. Through this human operation and surgeries will be possible. Moreover Al is also being used in various fields like agriculture, aviation etc. Foreign universities have used this technology to address social problems such as homelessness. Researchers are using Ai technology to analyze satellite images for identifying areas with higher poverty rates. Artificial intelligence is also helpful in job search.
In agriculture Al is used for gaining yield and increase in the research and development of growing crops.
The aviation industry uses Ai for mission management aids and support system for tactical decision making. Al is also being used in human resource and recruiting for the purpose of screening resumes and ranking candidates NITI AAYOG has identified sectors like agriculture, education, infrastructure, smart cities and transportation for the implementation of Al. In the field of agriculture it can result in increasing the income of the farmer and productivity of the farm with less of waste production. Al will bring an ease in the access and affordability of quality healthcare. Growing urban population can be benefited with efficient infrastructure. Smart and safe mode of transportation can be developed through Al. It would further help in increasing enhanced governance and strengthen Make in India programme as well. And this can pave a way forward for India in becoming a hub for manufacturing with assistive technology.
Though there are benefits of using Al technology but there are some challenges too like lack of expertise, skilled manpower, low extent of research and high cost. There is very low awareness regarding adoption of technology, security concerns, privacy and ethical regulations. Technical universities in India are unable to use and strengthen A ecosystem.
The challenges can be overcome by adopting various steps like partnership and collaboration this will focus on direct transfer of knowledge, setting up of e-cells in institutions like IIT's. Spreading the advantages of Al technology by making the senior level officials among the government employees, public sector and other firms aware of the advantages of Ai. Startups and small firms should be supported in the initial days by the government and incubation hubs should be setup to help the Al based startups. Banks should focus on using Al for enhancing customer experience, security and risk management. Laws should also be made to focus the security and adverse effects created by Al based systems.
As per NITI AYOG, India's approach towards Al strategy needs to be balanced for local needs and greater good. The way forward for Al in India requires large scale transformational interventions that are led by the government and support of private sector. There are speculations that after rigorous adoption of Al, it might culminate into job loss of existing workforce. So, existing workforce need to be reskilled and students should be prepared to apply developing set of skills for changing world of technology. Adoption of Al in India is limited as well as startup ecosystem in Al is virtually non-existent. For the adoption of Al in India there are certain difficulties like accessing of data, high cost and low availability of computing infrastructure. To overcome these difficulties data sets should be made and multi-stakeholder marketplaces need to be created across Al value chain.
