NITI Aayog invites students to tackle data science challenges
NEWDELHI: NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant invited students to develop technologies that could act as disruptors in the education sector.
Addressing a group of students at an artificial intelligence (AI) hackathon event at IIT Delhi, he said that while the country was growing at a rate of 7.6% currently, students needed to look beyond textbooks to create disruptive technologies that could enable the country to grow at a higher rate.
Urging students to use artificial intelligence and data science, he asked them to provide sustainable solutions to two problems. The first being creation of prediction models based on very large datasets collected by both government and private schools to identify the biggest influence on students’ performance.
The second challenge is to create language learning tools and conversation agents capable of understanding different grammars to enable learning across diverse linguistic groups and eliminate language barriers. The best proposals will be awarded by NITI Aayog.
He suggested that students think of technologies that could be applied to solve problems related to India. “Silicon Valley is a hub of innovation with technology-based products like war machines and driverless cars but these are not relevant to the Indian context,” he said.
According to him, what needed attention were issues such as how to make India sewage free and how to provide arsenic and fluoride free drinking water in rural areas.
Finding solutions to these problems would not just help 1.2 billion people of India but 7 billion people who could move from poverty to middle class across the world.
Congratulating the participants of the hackathon, Kant announced that NITI Aayog was building an open data portal which would host non-personalised secondary data created by the government with combined data sets for visualisation. Researchers were expected to utilised AI and natural language processing for an easier search as well as train their algorithms to utilise these datasets, he explained.
Currently, NITI Aayog supports 1000 tinkering labs under the Atal Innovation Mission to enable students to go beyond books to solve problems from an earlier age with plans to increase this number in place.
Emphasising on the need for innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence, Kant said that while scientists in India produced extensive research, the real challenge lay in applying technologies to the key sectors of education, healthcare and nutrition.
“To get the advantage of the demographic dividend, we need to move forward in the area of education where we have succeeded in providing access but the quality of education has fallen,” he said.
The next ten years were extremely critical to India’s growth where we could either leapfrog or remain relegated to a developing country’s status, he added.
According to him, the role of artificial intelligence and data science was thus, crucial to this sector and could solve problems related to quality, scale and access.
The event was organised by OpenEd.ai.