Telangana: 2020 announced as Year of AI

IT Minister K T Rama Rao says, aim to establish Hyderabad as among the top 25 global AI innovation hubs.

Hyderabad: The government of Telangana has announced 2020 as the Year of AI and plans to make the next decade as Telangana’s decade of AI with an aim to establish Hyderabad as amongst the top 25 Global Artificial Intelligence (AI) Innovation Hubs.

Speaking at a meet, the Telangana IT Minister K T Rama Rao said, “In line with our vision and our approach, AI will be our focus for the coming year and beyond. While we are calling 2020 as the Year of AI, this event will set in motion a set of initiatives, which will potentially make the next decade as Telangana’s decade of AI. And the State is ready to capture the global AI opportunity.”

Rama Rao informed that Telangana, having established itself as a pioneer in IT and innovation is quick to adapt to the needs of the rapidly transforming AI industry. And in line with the national strategy, the State has decided to take a focused approach for AI and take it to the next level, setting an example for other States to follow suit.

The government plans to attract and enable 200 AI innovators/startups leading to a valuation of $3-4 billion to build their base in Hyderabad along with educate and attract top AI talent to work on critical areas and enable government and key industry verticals to leverage AI and deliver public transformation contributing an additional 1 per cent to Telangana’s GDP.

He mentioned that the government has identified six key pillars to strategise AI creation of datasets and developing a data exchange platform whose aim will be democratise seamless availability of data in the areas of mobility, healthcare, agriculture and e-governance that can be used in innovation, governance and successful business outcomes.

He also informed that the State would be a nationally and globally recognised resource center for data sets and algorithms from and for India, with a mechanism to make these available for research and innovation along with creating India AI Data Trust.

The second pillar is making the required infrastructure available by setting up super computing infrastructure. “We plan to make available a high-performance AI computing (HPAIC) infrastructure to startups and research centres,” he said.

The third is the availability of quality talent pool through various hackathons and certification programmes along with training 30,000 students in AI/ML/DS and Deep Learning in the next three years. The fourth pillar is governance, ethics and privacy. “We plan to develop a governance framework in key sectors and set up an advisory council on the ethical use of data and further develop guidelines that would help to organisations implement practices and measures in the model framework,” he said.

Fifth pillar is research and innovation wherein the government would like to develop human capacity in advanced AI technologies aimed at solving India specific problems by attracting talented researchers across the world to work at our research centres.

“Government would also continue to support Govtech innovation by startups by procuring emerging technologies solutions from them. We have startups who are moving to Hyderabad because of the ecosystem present here and because the Telangana Govt is acting as the primary buyer or the first customer for emerging technologies, including AI,” Rao said.

The final pillar is enabling AI adoption and community collaboration wherein the state is already leading the way globally for ‘Government-as-a-buyer’ for AI which is transforming public service delivery and governance with deep technology.

Along with launching the logo and website marking 2020 as the Year of AI, the Minister also unveiled the Calendar of Year of AI marking several events around AI lined up for the year.