Stakeholder Engagements and Persuasive Advocacy
Enabling a Robust Policy-oriented and Technology-driven AI Ecosystem in India
July 17, 2020
Ashoka University hosted a virtual webinar on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for enabling effective knowledge exchange, facilitating the dissemination of state-of-the-art research in AI and strengthening academia-industry collaborative efforts in the field. The workshop featured well-known academicians, policy experts, thought leaders from the industry and practitioners who spoke about their insights and experiences in the field ranging from academic learnings to practical applications and policy implications of AI.
The workshop was structured to foster discussions on six primary sub-themes, namely, Core AI, AI in the education sector, in healthcare, for supply-chain management, as a social good and its policy dimensions in the context of an emerging economy, India.
AI offers tremendous scope for growth and development in the economy. The talks by the eminent speakers reinforced the potential of AI in problem-solving, skills development, higher education and advanced research, innovation, employment generation and in the development of sustainable supply-chain solutions, The conceptual facets of the talks were centered around building an understanding for: fundamental gaps in the current state of AI vs natural intelligence (especially in the pandemic times) and bridging them; AI’s contribution in transforming the education landscape; automatic essay grading and multiple strategies for solving the task including classical classification, deep learning and sophisticated features like reader gaze behaviour and the use of embedded knowledge graphs in intelligent decision making.
Among other things, the practical application of AI involves the need for addressing the ethical concerns in demand infusing sectors like healthcare-driven AI applications; robustness issues in building dependable machine learning and computer vision systems; ensuring a robust AI-driven supply chain ecosystem which can be used to generate insights into consumer behaviour, public procurement, product and services design, demand estimations, warehousing, logistics and returns management; creating suitable forecasting mechanisms with the help of AI against unforeseen events implementing well-thought-through strategies and proactive policies to accelerate AI-oriented positive social impact and development through collaborative efforts and learnings of global best practices. After-all, a vibrant AI ecosystem rests on a robust policy framework backed up with improved education and research in the field, academia-industry collaborations, a sustainable balancing of start-ups, SMEs and large industries and a thriving culture of innovation.
Landscaping Priority Areas for Blockchain: Cryptoeconomics, Capacity building, Scalability, Security
January 24, 2020
Ashoka University, in the first of its kind Science Policy Initiative, hosted a Policy Discussion with subject experts on Blockchain Technology, in January. The overarching theme of the meeting was Landscaping Priority Areas for Blockchain: Cryptoeconomics, Capacity building, Scalability, Security.
Blockchain is an emerging field that is steadily revolutionizing the technology landscape. This Distributed Ledger Technology is globally considered as a secure method of storing and updating a database, within and between entities. Blockchain Technology (BT)’s reported use cases are abound in areas, as diverse as, banking and financial services, smart contracts, voting, legal records, health records, internet identity and DNS, accounting, sharing economy, social media, publishing, critical infrastructure, crowd-funding, human resource, energy supply, supply chain management, insurance, stock market, cloud computing, and so on. As bitcoins and altcoins continue to grow and mature, BT’s real value addition is gradually drawing the attention of the thought leaders and policy analysts. Today, such policy experts, academicians, and industry players have started to evaluate BT’s contributions in the socio-economic development of India
Keeping in mind the interdisciplinary nature of this field, the university took up this initiative on blockchain to discuss key policy aspects that could be explored in the Indian context, to leverage BT’s growing advantages. The engagements and policy discussions during the meeting, were held among distinguished thought leaders from the government, academic community and the industry.
