Kharagpur (West Bengal), Oct 8 (IANS) Close to 1,100 budding engineers interacted with industry experts, researchers and entrepreneurs at the twin Artificial Intelligence (AI) summits organised by IIT-Kharagpur and its alumni simultaneously here and at Bengaluru, the premier institute said on Monday.
The summits, spread over Saturday and Sunday, brought together stakeholders engaged in cutting edge developments in AI or making use of AI applications in their field of work, an IIT-Kharagpur release said here.
"Close to 1,100 budding engineers from these two cities delved into the challenges pertaining to illiteracy, hunger, disease, natural disasters, speech recognition, advanced transportation, consumer behaviour, market analytics etc. - and how AI can be used to solve them," the release said.
The summits belong to the genre of outreach programmes conducted by the institute focused towards challenges and applications of AI which are directly going to impact people's lives significantly in the near future.
The AI Centre of Excellence was launched at the institute earlier in 2018.
Experts feel that following the IT wave of the 90s and the 21st century, AI could turn out to be the next key element for the economic development of India.
"Adopting to AI on a large scale and for the masses is quite possible in India, given that the country already has a lot going for it by way of digital penetration, its huge talent pool, and its proven ability to scale up new technology. India stands to benefit from AI in a big way," said Pallab Dasgupta, Dean, Sponsored Research and Industrial Consultancy (SRIC), IIT-Kharagpur.
In the AI summit organised by the department of computer science and engineering and the Centre for AI here, researchers and industry experts demonstrated how AI was being used in their respective fields - be it retail, banking, healthcare, transport or education.
In the two-day event at Bengaluru, Professor P.P. Chakrabarti, Director, IIT-Kharagpur discussed the roadmap of the Centre for AI with corporations, start-ups and industry experts. Many of them included the alumni of the Institute who have been successful proponents of various AI technologies.
