Strengthening its commitment to galvanizing the artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem in India and nurturing local talent, Intel hosted its premier global AI developer event, the Intel AI DevCamp (Intel AIDC), in Bengaluru recently. Built by AI practitioners, the conference included an AI developer workshop providing 150 developers hands-on experience using Intel’s AI hardware and software portfolio. Intel also announced that it has trained more than 150,000 developers, students and professors across 150 organizations in the country over the past two years.
“AI is swiftly becoming a reality for enterprises and has found applications across industries,” said Prakash Mallya, Vice President & Managing Director – Sales & Marketing Group, Intel India. “With talent becoming a key driver of competitive advantage, India has an opportunity to tap into its existing pool of mathematicians, statisticians and programmers and nurture this talent to leverage their skills for analytics and AI. At Intel, we’re encouraged by the impact that AI is having, driven by our rich community of developers. In addition to training 150,000 developers, students and professors, we have also trained 50% of our employees across functions in India on the basic concepts of AI with the goal to have the majority of our employees trained by the end of the year. We also offer advanced AI learning modules for our specialized talent.”
Why It’s Important: India ranks amongst the top three countries in the world in AI skills[1], top three in AI research[2], top nine when it comes to AI specialists[3], and top 20 on the AI Readiness Index[4]. The demand for advanced AI-related technologies has the potential to unlock a trillion-dollar opportunity for India[5]. Intel recognizes that the complexity of bringing AI from model to real-world deployment takes a mix of established and novel hardware and software solutions and is committed to collaborating with the AI community to accelerate discoveries and make meaningful progress in how we use AI to add value to our work and lives.
Intel® AIDC is one such effort to put AI tools into the hands of scientists, developers, analysts, and engineers. The event also serves as a showcase of innovation being driven in collaboration with industry leaders. This year, Wipro demonstrated Intel® AI-powered use cases such a medical image segmentation and diagnosis, the detection of anomalies in pipelines, and detection of surface cracks in high-rise buildings, bridges and complex structures.
Supriyo Das, Vice President & Global Practice Head – Software Engineering, Industrial & Engineering Services, Wipro Limited said, “Wipro offers customers a suite of AI enabled solutions which include both products and services. Based on Intel Architecture, these solutions, are in line with our EngineeringNXT approach and accelerate our ability to address very complex problems. These solutions are easy to deploy and perform well, on our customers’ existing Intel Infrastructure, both at the edge and in the data center.”
More Details: Focusing on training, research, and the future of AI, Intel® AIDC brought together data scientists, deep learning engineers, machine learning engineers, AI application developers, researchers, and start up technologists in a unique immersive environment. Speakers from Amazon, National Instruments, Wipro Limited, AllGoVision and OutDU, together with Intel innovators were at the DevCamp, addressing various facets of AI, ranging from the evolution of AI thinking and its capability to create new revenue streams, to the possibilities of AI when it comes to solving real-world challenges.
“There is a need for coordinated initiative between academic institutions and the industry to address the gap between the demand and supply of AI-related skills,” said Dr. Sridhar Mitta, Founder & Managing Director, NextWealth Entrepreneurs. “The Indian IT industry had succeeded in the past by drawing talent mainly from the metros and big cities. Today, AI provides us a huge opportunity to be more inclusive by enlisting talent from small towns. NextWealth in partnership with other industry players has established a Centre of Excellence (COE) at Mahendra Engineering College near Salem to impart AI skills as part of their curriculum using content and courseware provided by Intel. Enabling training access and employment opportunities for India’s vast talent pool is a key step towards accelerating AI innovation in the country.”
AI is more than deep learning; it’s a complex mix of workloads with varying compute, storage, memory, and communications needs. Today, Intel technologies power some of the most promising AI use cases – from fighting cancer to advancing brain research, to detecting fraud in our financial systems or increasing agricultural output to feed the world’s burgeoning population. Intel is focused on building for AI across a spectrum of applications and designing to scale with an AI portfolio that combines multipurpose, purpose-built, customizable, and application-specific solutions.
Intel continues to engage AI developers and startups in India through the Intel® AI Academy, the Intel AI Builders Program and the Intel AI Student Ambassador Program to accelerate AI through the development of fast emerging use cases.
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References
[1] LinkedIn: https://economicgraph.linkedin.com/blog/how-artificial-intelligence-is-already-impacting-todays-jobs
[2] Itihaasa: http://www.itihaasa.com/pdf/Report_Final_ES.pdf
[3] Element AI: https://jfgagne.ai/talent-2019/
[4] International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and Oxford Insights: https://www.oxfordinsights.com/ai-readiness2019
[5] NASSCOM: https://www.nasscom.in/sites/default/files/media_pdf/Press-Release-Accelerate-10X-launch.pdf