News Analysis India

Tag: artificial intelligence

  • Opt for challenges over comforts, PM Modi to IIT-Kanpur techies

    Express News Service

    LUCKNOW: Claiming that getting admitted to as prestigious an institution as IIT-Kanpur might have given them the confidence to explore the world, beating the fear of the unknown, Prime Minister Narendra Modi exhorted the students to opt for challenges whenever they were faced with making a choice between the challenges and the comfort.

    “IIT-Kanpur has given you a massive canvas to explore your dreams and the world out there. Now there is no ‘Fear of Unknown’. There is no longer the ‘Query of Unknown’, but ‘Quest for the Best’ and a dream to conquer the whole world,” PM Modi said.

    “Challenges are always there in life. Whenever you are made to choose between the challenges and the comfort, opt for challenges as you are the hunter and the challenges are the hunted,” said the PM.

    Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the observations while addressing the 54th convocation ceremony of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur on Tuesday.

    Suggesting the students to make their life a judicious blend of technology and emotions, the PM cautioned the budding technologist against being driven by technology alone.

    Calling the students the finest tech minds of IIT who “eat, drink and breathe technology”, he said technology had its own positives. “But never become the robot version of yourself. Keep the emotions and human sensitivities always alive in life,” advised the PM.

    He added that artificial intelligence was very good and that it should be there but not at the cost of human intelligence. “When it comes to show the emotion, the message : http/404/ … should not be there telling that the page doesnot exist,” added the PM on a lighter note.

    The Prime Minister also told the students that the training that they had received, skills and knowledge they had acquired would help them in making a mark of their own in the world.

    Modi asked the students to become impatient for a self-reliant India, follow their passion for technology. He claimed that they had the responsibility to give a direction and pace to the nation till the next 25 years. 

    “When you are stepping out with IIT’s legacy at the time of the Amrit Mahotsav, you should move out with the dream of how India would be in 2047. You have to hold the responsibility of India’s journey of development in the next 25 years.

    You’ll have to work for an India when you will have completed 50 years of your life and for that, you need to work from now.”

    The Prime Minister traced the history saying: “Today, the thinking and attitude of the country is the same as yours. Earlier, if the thinking was that of perfunctory work, then today thinking is result-oriented. Earlier, if there was an attempt to get away from the problems, then today resolutions are taken to solve the problems.”

    The PM remarked that in this 75th year of independence, India has more than 75 unicorns and more than 50,000 start-ups. Of these, 10,000 have come only in the last six months, the PM highlighted. “Today, India has emerged as the second-largest start-up hub in the world and the third largest country in Unicorns,” PM said.

  • Reading X-ray via WhatsApp: AI-driven ‘XraySetu’ helps doctors detect Covid in rural population

    By Express News Service
    NEW DELHI: A new AI-driven platform will now help early intervention through rapid screening of COVID-19 with the help of Chest X-ray interpretation over WhatsApp for doctors who have access to X-ray machines. 

    XraySetu can work with low-resolution images sent via mobiles, is quick and easy to use, and can facilitate detection in rural areas.

    At a time when such tests are taking more than a week across some cities, the challenge is even more for rural areas. Easy alternative tests are necessary as RT-PCR tests also give a ‘false negative’ for some variants.

    ARTPARK (AI & Robotics Technology Park), a not-for-profit foundation established by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, with support from the Department of Science & Technology (DST), Govt. of India, in collaboration with Bangalore-based HealthTech startup Niramai and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), has developed XraySetu specifically designed to identify COVID positive patients even from low-resolution Chest X-Ray images sent over Whatsapp.

    It has semantic annotations of affected areas for review and localized heat-map by doctors to help them verify it easily with other modalities and has already served close to 1200+ reports so far from the interior parts of India.

    To conduct these health check ups, a doctor simply needs to visit www.xraysetu.com and click on the ‘Try the Free X-raySetu Beta’ button. The platform will then redirect the person to another page, wherein he or she can choose to engage with the WhatsApp-based chatbot via web or smartphone application. 

    The solution also allows a doctor to simply send a WhatsApp message to the phone number +91 8046163838 to start the XraySetu service. Then they just need to click the picture of the patient’s X-ray and obtain the 2-page automated diagnostics with annotated images in a few minutes. While extending the probability of the COVID-19 contraction, the report also highlights a localized heatmap for a quick perusal of the doctor. 

    Tested and validated with over 1,25 000 X-ray images from National Institute of Health, UK, as well as over 1000+ Indian COVID patients from, XraySetu, has shown excellent performance with Sensitivity: 98.86 per cent, and Specificity: 74.74 per cent.

    Mr. Umakant Soni, Founder, and CEO, ARTPARK, said, “We need to scale technology for addressing the needs of 1.36 billion people, especially considering that we have only 1 radiologist for over 1 million people here. Built with the collaboration of industry and academia, XraySetu paves the way for exponential technologies like AI to leapfrog and provide cutting-edge healthcare technology to rural India in an extremely cost-effective manner.

    “XraySetu provides an automated interpretation of Chest X-Rays to predict if a patient has any lung abnormality that indicates COVID-19 infection,” said Dr. Geetha Manjunath, Founder, and CEO, Niramai.

    “In the absence of COVID positive X-Ray images, we developed a unique Transfer Learning framework that leverages easily available X-ray images of lungs, not necessarily COVID positive, to learn useful features which have high predictive power. We also developed a confidence score which is guided by the areas of lungs that are infected. The system outputs a prediction, localizes the infected parts, and creates a report which gives a confidence score, all within a few minutes”, said Prof. Chiranjib Bhattacharyya, IISc.

    Besides COVID-19, the platform can also detect 14 additional lung-related ailments, including tuberculosis and pneumonia, alongside others. It can further be used for both analog and digital X-rays and has been successfully piloted by more than 300 doctors in rural areas over the last 10 months.

    Dr. Padmanabh Kamath, Prof & HOD Cardiology, KMC, Mangalore, who has been an early advisor and user of XraySetu, stressed that technologies like these could take healthcare and technology to the underprivileged in rural areas. Another early user of the service, Dr. Anil Kumar A D, Medical Officer of Health, Shimoga in Karnataka, was happy that the technology is helping to get quick diagnosis of patients.

    “Several Hubs of Cyber-physical Systems established by DST are working on leveraging of Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Data Analytics, Robotics, Sensors and other tools to address the challenges of the health sector from diagnostics, and drug design to biomedical devices to telemedicine,” said Prof Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, DST.

  • AI getting big push in educational institutes, says government at Parliament

    By Express News Service
    NEW DELHI: The Union Education Ministry has asked all institutions approved by the All-India Council for Technical Institutions to offer artificial intelligence (AI) as an elective in B Tech courses and also, start a B Tech course in AI and data science.

    This, said Education Minister Ramesh Pokhariyal ‘Nishank’ in Parliament on Monday, is aimed at augmenting the human resource in AI and data analytics. 

    The government also said in its reply to the House that the National Council of Educational Research & Training has initiated the process for the preparation of a new national curriculum framework for school education as proposed in the National Education Policy, 2020 during which the possibility of introducing an introductory course on AI at the secondary level is being explored.

     The CBSE had introduced artificial intelligenceas a subject in Class IX two years back and in Class XI last year in their affiliated schools.

  • Facebook taking action on objectionable content, AI is taking help

    Social media company Facebook is resorting to artificial intelligence (Artificial Intelligence-AI) to take fast action on harmful and objectionable content. The company uses this technology to determine the priority of ‘complained content’. Facebook has more than 1.82 billion daily active users worldwide. In the past, the company has had to listen a lot in terms of dealing with the content that promotes hate in India. While India is one of its biggest markets.

    Facebook’s Product Manager (Community Integrity) Ryan Byrnes said that the company is using AI to prioritize complained content. Setting priority in this way is very important to help its more than 15,000 reviewers. He said that such priority is important for four reasons such that not all the content which causes harm is equal, some repatriation rules are complicated, people do not always complain about the harmful content and the complaints are not always right. Talking to reporters in the virtual program, he said that the company has now started looking ahead only by relying on the complaint of the user. Now he has started taking technology help in this process. He said that now with the help of this technology, 95% of such content gets caught in the company before anyone complains.

  • Narendra Modi to inaugurate artificial intelligence ‘RAISE’ summit on October 5

    Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the RAISE 2020- ‘Responsible AI for Social Empowerment 2020,’ a mega virtual summit on Artificial Intelligence (AI) on October 5 at 7 PM.

    The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and NITI Aayog are organising the Mega Virtual Summit AI from October 5-9, 2020.

    RAISE 2020 will be a global meeting of minds to exchange ideas and chart a course for using AI for social transformation, inclusion and empowerment in areas like Healthcare, Agriculture, Education and Smart Mobility, among other sectors.

    At the RAISE 2020, delegates and experts in research, policy and innovation on Artificial Intelligence will join from across the globe. The summit will discuss cross-sector subjects like ‘Leveraging AI for Pandemic Preparedness’, ‘The Impetus that Innovation Places on Digitisation’, ‘Inclusive AI’, ‘Partnerships for Successful Innovation’ etc. The RAISE 2020 Summit will also feature some of the most exciting startups working in Artificial Intelligence-related fields. Startups chosen through the AI Solution Challenge will showcase their solutions in the AI Startup Pitchfest scheduled on 6th Oct 2020. This is part of Government of India’s continuing support to tech entrepreneurs and startups by providing exposure, recognition and guidance.

  • Google News to Get Artificial Intelligence Upgrade

    For its updated news application, Google is doubling down on the use of artificial intelligence as part of an effort to weed our disinformation and help users get viewpoints beyond their own “filter bubble.” Google chief Sundar Pichai, who unveiled the updated Google News earlier this month, said the app now “surfaces the news you care about from trusted sources while still giving you a full range of perspectives on events.” It marks Google’s latest effort to be at the centre of online news and includes a new push to help publishers get paid subscribers through the tech giant’s platform.

    According to product chief Trystan Upstill, the news app “uses the best of artificial intelligence to find the best of human intelligence — the great reporting done by journalists around the globe.” While the app will enable users to get “personalized” news, it will also include top stories for all readers, aiming to break the so-called filter bubble of information designed to reinforce people’s biases. “Having a productive conversation or debate requires everyone to have access to the same information,” Upstill said. He said the “full coverage” feed would be the same for everyone — “an unpersonalized view of events from a range of trusted news sources.” Some journalism industry veterans were sceptical about the effort to replace human editors with machine curators. “There’s been a fantasy of (algorithmic) personalized news for a long time,” said New York University journalism professor Meredith Broussard.

    “Nobody has ever gotten it right. I think that news designers and homepage editors do a good job of curating already.” Google and Facebook have also been criticized for scooping up most online ad revenues and for enabling false information to spread. Recently, News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson called for an “algorithm review board” that would “oversee these historically influential digital platforms and ensure that there is no algorithmic abuse or censorship.”