Know all about US India Artificial Intelligence Initiative (USIAI). United States India Artificial Intelligence, USIAI initiative has been launched to enhance the technological relationships between the two countries.

US India Artificial Intelligence Initiative: Why in News?

United States India Artificial Intelligence, USIAI initiative has been launched to enhance the technological relationships between the two countries.  DST secretary Ashutosh Sharma in the curtain raiser of the event talked about the importance of scaling up the S&T relationship between India and the United States. This would also be helpful in solving problems of both countries and overcoming barriers for growth, he said. 

Sharma also added, “research, technology in artificial intelligence is being promoted and implemented in the country through a network of 25 technology hubs working as a triple helix set up under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS)”. 

US India Artificial Intelligence Initiative: Details

It is an initiative of Indo-US Science and Technology Forum (IUSSTF) and it was established in March 2000. 

The Department of Science & Technology (DST), Government of India, and the U.S. Department of State are respective nodal departments for IUSSTF.

USIAI would focus on AI cooperation in critical areas that are priorities for both US and India. 

US India Artificial Intelligence Initiative: Significance

1. The cooperation will provide an opportunity to discuss the emerging AI landscape, and address the challenges of developing an AI workforce.
2. As per the official statement,” USIAI will serve as a platform to discuss opportunities, challenges, and barriers for bilateral AI research and development collaboration, enable AI innovation, help share ideas for developing an AI workforce, and recommend modes and mechanisms for catalysing partnerships”
3. USIAI would aid AI cooperation in critical areas like healthcare, smart cities, materials, agriculture, energy, and manufacturing which are useful for both the countries. 

India is already prepared:

1. India has recently launched National AI strategy through NITI Ayog and National AI Portal (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology). 
2. It has also spread AI in various sectors like education, healthcare, agriculture and commerce etc. 
3. Also MyGov Corona Helpdesk Chatbot was the winner at CogX 2020 under two categories: Best Innovation for Covid-19 – Society and People’s Choice Covid-19 Overall Winner.
4. India is also a member of Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI).
5. India reported a 45% increase in the use of Artificial Intelligence, the highest among all countries
6. Responsible AI for Social Empowerment 2020 (RAISE 2020) was jointly organised by the NITI Aayog and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY)

Artificial Intelligence:

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions. AI can also be used  for any machine that demonstrates traits associated with a human mind such as learning and problem-solving. Artificial intelligence has an ability to rationalize and take actions that can achieve a specific goal. AI includes technologies like machine learning, pattern recognition, big data, neural networks, self algorithms etc.

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In celebration of International Women’s Day, women data scientists from around the world will gather together virtually on March 7 and 8, 2021, for presentations, workshops and networking at the Women in Data Science (WiDS) Worldwide Conference. The event offers women in data science, a chance to recognize their social, economic, cultural and political achievements.

“Data science is the new gold or the new oil,” WiDS co-founder Dr. Margot Gerritsen said. “Data-driven decision making is in all aspects of our lives. It’s important that all sorts of genders, cultures and backgrounds are represented in this development.”

Like many women working in fields still dominated by men, Dr. Margot Gerritsen remembers the tipping point that inspired her to co-found WiDS with Karen Matthys. Invited to attend a conference by a male colleague, she noted that the event featured no women keynote speakers. Her colleague offered a familiar explanation: There were so few women in the field that he couldn’t find one to present at the event.

Less than a year later, the first WiDS Worldwide Conference proved him wrong: Over 6,000 people from around the world joined the conference livestream. By 2020, over 30,000 participants in more than 50 countries tuned in.

According to conference organizer Judy Logan, the WiDS Worldwide Conference has been global since its start. The initial conference livestream’s popularity showed co-directors Gerritsen, Logan and Matthys the international demand for collaboration and networking among women data scientists around the world.

The virtual nature of the conference allowed women to connect with one another across borders without the elitist registration and travel costs of other conventions. The WiDS Worldwide Conference encourages women in data science to establish their own national and regional networks while participating in a broader global conversation. As advocates recognize, data science needs diverse perspectives to determine the future of data-driven decision making in a world where data collection and analysis are increasingly (and unevenly) penetrating every aspect of peoples’ lives.

The opening presentations for this year’s conference include a fireside chat with Nobel Laureate and physicist Andrea Ghez—only the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize for Physics—and a presentation by Emily Fox, distinguished engineer (Apple) and professor (University of Washington) on health and machine learning. Additional presentations center the work and research of data scientists working around the world.

For example, Dr. Kalinda Griffiths, a scientist at the Centre for Big Data Research in Health at the University of New South Wales, will discuss her research addressing health disparities among indigenous peoples, including how they have been defined and how identifications are operationalized in government data collections.

Dr. Fatima Abu Salem, associate professor of computer science at the American University of Beirut (AUB), will discuss “Doing Data Science in Data Deserts,” a presentation that looks at how grassroots initiatives are facilitating data collection efforts in countries where data is less abundant and accessible.

This year’s conference features the fourth incarnation of WiDS datathon, an event in which participants are given a dataset and a problem for which they must use their ingenuity and data science skills to explore solutions. This year’s datathon reflects WIDS’ commitment to solving problems with global ramifications: Datathon participants have been asked to create models to determine whether patients have been diagnosed with a certain type of diabetes that might improve ICU treatment.

The WiDS Worldwide Conference is open to all interested in ensuring that the future of data science is diverse and inclusive. Information about registration fees and platform can be found on the WIDS website.

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SoftBank Group Corp, as part of its Academy of Artificial Intelligence (AI), announced on February 18 its support for Data Science for All / Empowerment (DS4A / Empowerment, for its acronym in English). This alliance aims to train and improve the skills of underrepresented communities seeking opportunities in the field of data science.

Developed by Correlation One, DS4A / Empowerment aims to train 10,000 people giving priority to Afro-descendants, Latinos, women, LGBTQ + and United States military veterans, over the next three years, providing new paths to economic opportunities in one of the fastest growing industries in the world.

The SoftBank AI Academy supports programs that complement the theoretical training of traditional technical education courses with practical lessons, including artificial intelligence and data management skills that can be immediately applied to business needs.

DS4A / Empowerment will provide training to employees of SoftBank Group International portfolio companies, including the Opportunity Fund and Latam Fund, as well as external candidates from the United States and Latin America, including Mexico.

The program is specifically designed to address gender equity and talent gaps in a field that has historically been inaccessible to many people, leading to a significant under -representation of women and Afro-descendants. Participants will work on real case studies that are expected to have a measurable impact on the operating performance of participating companies.

IDB Lab, the innovation laboratory of the Inter-American Development Bank Group, will join SoftBank and provide more than 10 full scholarships to underrepresented candidates in Latin America, while Beacon Council will offer 4 full scholarships for underrepresented candidates based in Miami.

Program participants will receive 13 weeks of data and analytics training (including optional Python training) while working on case studies and projects, including projects presented by SoftBank’s portfolio of companies. The initiative will also link participants with mentors who will provide career development and guidance. Upon completion of the program, external participants will be connected to employment opportunities at SoftBank and leading companies in the business, financial services, technology, healthcare, consulting and consumer sectors.

Program and enrollment details

DS4A Empowerment is an online program taught in English over a period of 13 weeks. Classes will be held on Saturdays from 10:00 am to 8:00 pm (Eastern Time, ET), beginning April 17, 2021.

The program registration period ends on March 7, 2021. Applicants who might consider applying include employees from the portfolio of companies affiliated with SoftBank in the region, as well as software engineers, technical product managers, technical marketers and anyone with a background in STEM who is interested in learning data analysis. To apply and learn more about the program, interested candidates can visit the official website of DS4A Empowerment .

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The deployment of machine learning models in production is failing to keep pace with the everyday operations of hyper-scalers. Those scaling and deployment gaps are being addressed through collaborations and a new batch of DevOps tools tuned to scaling machine learning deployments.

The latest initiative aimed at expanding the MLOps ecosystem comes via a series of technology partnerships and native integration with tools such as TensorFlow along with expanded cloud infrastructure support. Dotscience, a machine learning operations specialist, announced partnerships with GitLab and Grafana Labs along with platform integrations to TensorFlow, H2O.ai and Scikit-learn.

The London-based MLOps vendor also announced expanded multi-cloud support with Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Microsoft Azure (NASDAQ: MSFT).

Collectively, the goal is “setting the bar for MLOps best practices for building production ML pipelines today,” said Luke Marsden, CEO and founder at Dotscience.

The partners also hope to tap into a projected $3.9 trillion market for AI-based opportunities over the next two years. Vendors such as Dotscience and Algorithmia are rolling out new tools aimed at enterprises currently struggling to deploy machine learning models in production. Among the initiatives announced by Dotscience on Wednesday (Dec. 18) is an effort to develop an industry benchmark for enterprise AI deployments.

To that end, platform monitoring specialist Grafana Labs and Dotscience are joining forces to improve visibility into machine learning workloads in production. The partnership would allow statistical monitoring of model behavior, including workloads using unlabeled data.

The partners also said their monitoring framework would help simplify model deployments via the Kubernetes cluster orchestrator.

“By bringing DevOps practices to ML, data science and ML teams can eliminate silos,” said Tom Wilkie, Grafana Labs’ vice president for products.

Separately, Dotscience announced a native integration with GitLab, the open source software repository. The collaboration would allow ML developers to use the Dotscience platform for machine learning data and model management. More than 100,000 developers currently use GitLab as a DevOps platform.

“We are enabling data scientists to deploy on their preferred ML framework.” Dotscience CEO Marsden said.

Those MLOps enhancement will be augmented with expanded cloud support via the AWS Marketplace and Microsoft Azure. The Dotscience platform is available either as a software service or on-premises.

The MLOps specialist also this week said financial API provider TrueLayer will use the Dotscience platform to improve reproducibility, model and data versioning along with provenance tracking. The partnership comes in response to growing demand for improved productivity, collaboration, governance and compliance as AI initiatives ramp up, the partners said.

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The MIT Press and the Harvard Data Science Initiative (HDSI) have announced the launch of the Harvard Data Science Review (HDSR). The open-access journal, published by MIT Press and hosted online via the multimedia platform PubPub, an initiative of the MIT Knowledge Futures group, will feature leading global thinkers in the burgeoning field of data science, making research, educational resources, and commentary accessible to academics, professionals, and the interested public. With demand for data scientists booming, HDSR will provide a centralized, authoritative, and peer-reviewed publishing community to service the growing profession.

The first issue features articles on topics ranging from authorship attribution of John Lennon-Paul McCartney songs to machine learning models for predicting drug approvals to artificial intelligence (AI). Future content will have a similar range of general interest, academic, and professional content intended to foster dialogue among researchers, educators, and practitioners about data science research, practice, literacy, and workforce development. HDSR will prioritize quality over quantity, with a primary emphasis on substance and readability, attracting readers via inspiring, informative, and intriguing papers, essays, stories, interviews, debates, guest columns, and data science news. By doing so, HDSR intends to help define and shape the profession as a scientifically rigorous and globally impactful multidisciplinary field.

Combining features of a premier research journal, a leading educational publication, and a popular magazine, HDSR will leverage digital technologies and advances to facilitate author-reader interactions globally and learning across various media.

The Harvard Data Science Review will serve as a hub for high-quality work in the growing field of data science, noted by the Harvard Business Review as the “sexiest job of the 21st century.” It will feature articles that provide expert overviews of complex ideas and topics from leading thinkers with direct applications for teaching, research, business, government, and more. It will highlight content in the form of commentaries, overviews, and debates intended for a wide readership; fundamental philosophical, theoretical, and methodological research; innovations and advances in learning, teaching, and communicating data science; and short communications and letters to the editor.

The dynamic digital edition is freely available on the PubPub platform to readers around the globe.

Amy Brand, director of the MIT Press, states, “For too long the important work of data scientists has been opaque, appearing mainly in academic journals with limited reach. We are thrilled to partner with the Harvard Data Science Initiative to publish work that will have a deep impact on popular understanding of the growing field of data science. The Review will be an unparalleled resource for advancing data literacy in society.”

Francesca Dominici, the Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population and Data Science, and David Parkes, the George F. Colony Professor of Computer Science, both at Harvard University, announce, “As codirectors of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, we’re thrilled for the launch of this new journal. With its rigorous and cross-disciplinary thinking, the Harvard Data ScienceReview will advance the new science of data. By sharing stories of positive transformational impact as well as raising questions, this collective endeavor will reveal the contours that will shape future research and practice.”

Xiao-li Meng,the Whipple V.N. Jones Professor of Statistics at Harvard and founding editor-in-chief of HDSR, explains, “The revolutionary ability to collect, process, and apply new analytics to extract powerful insights from data has a tremendous influence on our lives. However, hype and misinformation have emerged as unfortunate side effects of data science’s meteoric rise. The Harvard Data Science Review is designed to cut through the hype to engage readers with substantive and informed articles from the leading data science experts and practitioners, ranging from philosophers of ethics and historians of science to AI researchers and data science educators. In short, it is ‘everything data science and data science for everyone.’”

Elizabeth Langdon-Gray, inaugural executive director of HDSI, comments, “The Harvard Data Science Initiative was founded to foster collaboration in both research and teaching and to catalyze research that will benefit our society and economy. The Review plays a vital part in our effort to empower research progress and education globally and to solve some of the world’s most important challenges.”

The inaugural issue of HDSR will publish contributions from internationally renowned scholars and educators, as well as leading researchers in industry and government, such as Christine Borgman (University of California at Los Angeles), Rodney Brooks (MIT), Emmanuel Candes (Stanford University), David Donoho (Stanford University), Luciano Floridi (Oxford/The Alan Turing Institute), Alan M. Garber (Harvard), Barbara J. Grosz (Harvard), Alfred Hero (University of Michigan), Sabina Leonelli (University of Exeter), Michael I. Jordan (University of California at Berkeley), Andrew Lo (MIT), Maja Matarić (University of Southern California), Brendan McCord (U.S. Department of Defense), Nathan Sanders (WarnerMedia), Rebecca Willett (University of Chicago), and Jeannette Wing (Columbia University).

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Sagent Lending Technologies announced today an initiative to transform the borrower and the lender experience through Microsoft Azure. Sagent will leverage the potential of artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, and cognitive services available on Azure that will provide a reimagined experience for Sagent clients and their consumer borrowers.

Building on the SaaS technology and business process outsourcing capabilities, Sagent Lending Technologies, a joint venture between Warburg Pincus and Fiserv, Inc. is partnering with Microsoft to transform the experience of auto, mortgage, and consumer borrowers.

To accomplish this, Pennsylvania-based Sagent is working to deploy, operate, and secure software and services for the future of lending. This integration will use Azure to drive new levels of operating scale, end-to-end digital agility, and enhanced speed-to-market for Sagent clients that comprises a wide ecosystem of auto, mortgage and consumer lenders. It will also bring advanced data management and customer analytics that will be supplemented by Azure AI and Machine Learning tools to create an unequaled experience for borrowers and lenders.

“Having a vision for the future and realizing that through a thoughtful innovation plan supported by a strategic technology partner is what will uniquely allow our Sagent clients to win in the ever-evolving lending marketplace. Sagent is the technology partner for lenders who are willing to be a few steps ahead of the rest of the industry in realizing the future,” said Shaimaa Elk, EVP, CIO at Sagent Lending Technologies. “As a Microsoft Partner, Sagent’s utilization of the full breadth of the Azure cloud is central to realizing a vision for the future of lending and will benefit all of our clients by creating real innovation today and tomorrow.”

Toni Townes-Whitley, President of US Regulated Industries at Microsoft said, “Sagent Lending Technologies is embarking on a mission to change the face of the auto, mortgage, and consumer lending industry. We will be able to offer our mutual clients greater flexibility in how they receive and consume Sagent’s solutions using Microsoft technologies, and we will create a new customer experience and financial ecosystem in this digital age.”

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