India is set to witness rapid and dramatic changes in the next 10 years with the Niti Ayog giving its nod to the use of artificial intelligence in the fields of agriculture, health care and education and rural development. It will open up new avenues for employment for both technology experts and social scientists.
With these observations, the first session of Idea Conclave concluded at GB Pant Social Science Institute on Thursday.
The experts who participated in the first session included computer science experts Punam Bedi, Sudipta Roy, Vasundhara Bhatnagar, industry representatives GS Darbari and academicians Ashish Khare and Shahswat Biswas. The session was moderated by Prof US Tiwary of IIIT, Allahabad.
Earlier, explaining the basics of artificial intelligence to rural development students, Prof Punam Bedi of Delhi University highlighted the role played by data in the evolution of artificial intelligence through machine learning and deep learning.
“The industry will need lakhs of data managers to create and maintain clean data repositories related with rural India, which are absent right now,” Bedi pointed out.
To understand clean data repositories, data forms the backbone of any data analytics one does . Regarding data, there are many things to go wrong – be it the construction, arrangement, formatting, spellings, duplication, extra spaces, and so on. To perform the data analytics properly one needs various data cleaning techniques so that data is ready for analysis. This includes but is not limited to getting rid of extra spaces, selecting and treatingall blank cells, converting numbers stored as text into numbers, removing duplicates, highlighting errors, changing text to lower/upper/proper case, etc
{{/usCountry}}To understand clean data repositories, data forms the backbone of any data analytics one does . Regarding data, there are many things to go wrong – be it the construction, arrangement, formatting, spellings, duplication, extra spaces, and so on. To perform the data analytics properly one needs various data cleaning techniques so that data is ready for analysis. This includes but is not limited to getting rid of extra spaces, selecting and treatingall blank cells, converting numbers stored as text into numbers, removing duplicates, highlighting errors, changing text to lower/upper/proper case, etc
{{/usCountry}}“It is time we introduced artificial intelligence in the rural development curriculum,” responded Prof Suneet Singh, coordinator of the conclave.
Body corporate has a tendency to look at strong market signals and ignore weak signals of change in technology. Those who do not adapt to changing technologies, perish eventually. “There is a long list of such companies that were market leaders on the eve of previous technological revolution but vanished afterwards,” said IRMA, Ahmedabad Prof Shahswat Biswas, while presenting the case studies of several companies in his lecture.
Chief guest and IFFCO CEO Uday Shankar Aswasthi, pointed out in his keynote address that precision farming is the technology of the future that may change the way we look at rural economy. “We have developed nano-fertilisers, two milligrams of which can replace 100 kg of urea,” he said. “However, the future of rural development is deeply embedded in gender equality,” concluded Awasthi.
Photo Caption: Proceedings underway during Idea Conclave at GB Pant Social Science Institute on Thursday.