Google’s Workshop on AI/ML Research and Practice in India

April 24, 2018

Posted by Pankaj Gupta and Anand Rangarajan, Engineering Directors, Google India



Last month, Google Bangalore hosted the Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, with the goal of fostering collaboration between the academic and industry research communities in India. This forum was designed to exchange current research and industry projects in AI & ML, and included faculty and researchers from Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and other leading universities in India, along with industry practitioners from Amazon, Delhivery, Flipkart, LinkedIn, Myntra, Microsoft, Ola and many more. Participants spoke on the ongoing research and work being undertaken in India in deep learning, computer vision, natural language processing, systems and generative models (you can access all the presentations from the workshop here).

Google’s Jeff Dean and Prabhakar Raghavan kicked off the workshop by sharing Google’s uses of deep learning to solve challenging problems and reinventing productivity using AI. Additional keynotes were delivered by Googlers Rajen Sheth and Roberto Bayardo. We also hosted a panel discussion on the challenges and future of AI/ML ecosystem in India, moderated by Google Bangalore’s Pankaj Gupta. Panel participants included Anirban Dasgupta (IIT Gandhinagar), Chiranjib Bhattacharyya of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Ashish Tendulkar and Srinivas Raaghav (Google India) and Shourya Roy (American Express Big Data Labs).
Prabhakar Raghavan’s keynote address
Sessions
The workshop agenda included five broad sessions with presentations by attendees in the following areas:
Pankaj Gupta moderating the panel discussion
Summary and Next Steps
As in many countries around the world, we are seeing increased dialog on various aspects of AI and ML in multiple contexts in India. This workshop hosted 80 attendees representing 9 universities and 36 companies contributing 28 excellent talks, with many opportunities for discussing challenges and opportunities for AI/ML in India. Google will continue to foster this exchange of ideas across a diverse set of folks and applications. As part of this, we also announced the upcoming research awards round (applications due June 4) to support up to seven faculty members in India on their AI/ML research, and new work on an accelerator program for Indian entrepreneurs focused primarily on AI/ML technologies. Please keep an eye out for more information about these programs.