Telangana declares 2020 as the ‘Year of AI’

HYDERABAD: As a part of an ambitious plan to establish Hyderabad amongst the top 25 global Artificial Intelligence (AI) Innovation Hubs, the Government of Telangana has declared the year 2020 as the ‘Year of AI’. The State Government had signed a number of MoUs for this project. A Centre for Research in Applied AI (CRAAI) will be set up by the state government in association with Intel, International Institute of Information Technology-Hyderabad (IIIT-H) and Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI). CRAAI aims to make a major impact on domains such as mobility, healthcare and smart cities and will focus on diagnostics, public health, autonomous navigation and supply chain automation. It will also carry out research on connected vehicles & multi-vehicle systems and datasets.

Professor Ramesh Loganathan, Co-Innovation at IIIT-H explained that for CRAAI, the focus within mobility will be on autonomous navigation of vehicles, transport solutions, use of drones etc. In the healthcare domain, the focus will be on public health, diagnostics and devices. The Centre will also work towards creating solutions for smart cities and is currently identifying processes, collaborators, areas of work and projects within the broad framework.

For the project, IIIT-H’s expertise in AI research and technology covering computing, robotics, language processing, machine learning and date science will be utilised. The Centre’s work in the sphere of technology development will be coordinated by IIT-H.

PHFI comes with its understanding of public health and will help in domains such as preventive health, medical treatment and studying disease patterns. Collaboration with Intel will help in bringing industry perspective and funding to the CRAAI project.