With disruptive technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) driving businesses, the IT sector wants the Union Budget for fiscal 2020-21 to ensure greater use of these to spur a sluggish economy among other measures for the sector, industry experts said on Friday.

“The budget should announce a fund like Singapore’s Temasek that will invest only in early-stage Indian AI start-ups and lower long-term capital gain’s tax for investing in AI-based firms,” digital intelligence firm Germin8 founder and chief executive Ranjit Nair told IANS.

With the US and China racing ahead of India in AI research, AI entrepreneurship and government investment in AI, he said the budget should make it easier for start-ups to access capital, as they face an uphill task in early-stage funding.

“The government must bring policies that encourage AI companies. Ease of doing business means less bureaucracy so that entrepreneurs can build solutions without distractions,” he said.

AI is expected to have a huge impact not only in commerce, but also in health, national security, cybersecurity, food security, education and global warming.

“The government should announce AI challenges, which make academia and industry solve an important problem in the country. The state’s role should give a crisp problem definition, provide access to data and provide a good cash prize,” Nair said.

Though thousands of engineering graduates pass out every year across the country, India is behind other nations in AI PhDs and AI research. Hence, the budget should allot more grants for AI research and offer incentives to institutes investing in AI training, he added.

Noting that IT was one of the few sectors that remained growth-driven despite the economic slowdown since the last fiscal, Cigniti Technologies chairman C.V. Subramanyam said the budget should give relief or reduce dividend distribution tax (DDT) for IT firms operating in the country.

Anti-virus leader Kaspersky’s General Manager, South Asia, Dipesh Kaura said: “As the budget for the ensuing fiscal is crucial for businesses across the country, we are expecting higher allocations for cyber security from the government.”

Investment in cyber security will accelerate the digital transformation. Funds should be spent on supporting skill development and training students keen to become cyber security professionals, he said.

“Cyber security awareness campaign for consumers should be a major focus of the budget,” Kaura said in a statement.

Cybage Software chief executive Arun Nathani said the budget should take steps to roll back DDT across the board to attract FDI and incentivise the sector to ramp up the capex /opex spend once the demand is back.

“Rationalising the GST rates and compliance processes will outgrow the consumption rates. The Indian IT industry will welcome specific incentives like weighted deductions for investing in R&D of AI/BI technology tools to facilitate IT firms, companies, universities and research institutes,” Nathani added.

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Climate change has emerged as the biggest threat to humanity, with devastating consequences such as extreme weather events, climate migration, and a sharp decline in biodiversity. While the brunt of climate action is shouldered by green parties and public activists like the young Greta Thunberg, in recent years many industries have stepped up innovation to try and do their bit.

The informatics industry in particular has been flexing its R&D muscle to propose bleeding-edge solutions. A recent paper published by a group of high-profile AI experts and IT professionals explores the potential that can be found “at the nexus of climate change and machine learning”.

Headed by David Rolnick, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, the paper puts a spotlight on “high-impact opportunities for real-world change” present in such ML fields as artificial intelligence, computer vision, unsupervised learning, and more.

Elsewhere in the industry, a number of digital giants and startups are already implementing their own twists on machine learning-driven solutions for climate change prevention and mitigation.

Let’s examine the three main benefits that ML and its derivatives can offer to the organizations fighting for the future of our planet.

Better predictions and estimates

AI and deep learning can be a good fit for data-rich climate science projects that typically provide datasets of necessary depth and variety, such as the research led by Google, the Mila institute, or the German Aerospace Center. The resulting models can, for example, evaluate energy consumption levels in buildings and electric vehicles more accurately, making it easier to discover trends and predict future consumption. Down the line, this leads to effective energy distribution and battery management — pivotal tasks for those trying to minimize their carbon footprint and make a switch to renewables.

Other examples of deep data analysis in climate change-related research include Facebook’s AI-based population density map for the majority of Africa and the application of DCNNs for detecting extreme weather events like tropical cyclones, atmospheric rivers and weather fronts.

Improved tracking and monitoring

Computer vision technologies such as object recognition are increasingly used to supercharge the analysis of visual climate data. Potential applications range from monitoring the scale of deforestation to generating the size and location data for solar panels to gathering information about climate adaptation policies across communities and nations.

With climate change affecting wildlife all around the planet, conservationists need reliable solutions for tracking populations of endangered species without disturbing them. Appsilon’s animal recognition project is addressing this challenge with an AI model capable of recognizing specific kinds of animals in images. The model is trained using the transfer learning technique, which ensures accuracy even with smaller datasets.

Optimized legacy systems and workflows

Artificial intelligence solutions have proven their effectiveness in streamlining complex business workflows and enhancing legacy systems. In the context of “clean tech”, AI is poised to have an impact on the design of environmentally-friendly buildings, sustainable supply chains, the efficiency of freight transportation, and more.

One of the most important sectors for this kind of innovation is agriculture. AI development enables so-called precision agriculture — solutions that enable waste and carbon emission reduction while improving crop yield.

So is AI going to save us all?

The challenge of the climate crisis can also be viewed as an opportunity for forward-thinking tech businesses to make their contribution. Nevertheless, none of the solutions described above is a silver bullet. It will take coordinated action and commitment from all of us, not just the best brains of the IT sector, to tackle the problem.

At the same time, machine learning and AI have demonstrated enormous potential in reshaping our world — the ways we live, work, and consume. In the coming years, these powerful tools will surely form a crucial part in the global effort against catastrophic climate change. 

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Companies across the globe are quickly realizing that big data and analytics can help their operational effectiveness. Companies are trying to integrate new technologies into their current business plans and even going to lengths of to improve the efficiency of their operations.

Many companies have been asking the time-honored questions, how do we improve quality; how do we keep production at sustainable levels; how do we improve our current business model? Big data is playing a major role in this change, and these companies are embracing the fact that they have to use this data purposely.

Today, we will explore in more depth about the new era of big data and its potential untapped multi-billion dollar market.

Big Data Beginnings

Originally big data started off as only a term to describe a dataset that was beyond its scope of the average database. Thanks to the rise of technology over the last decade the term stuck and big data expanded giving birth to a whole new meaning. Big data expands upon being massive in its data set as well as being a collective set of technologies that manage, capture, and store this data in order that it may solve complex problems.

Dynamics of Big Data and Software Companies

Currently, many of the bridges between big data and software lie in the Internet of Things (IoT) connecting and tying everything together with the help of major Internet service providers. However, looking at this from the big data side many companies want to have all the answers with analytics and insight. On the other side of the coin, you have the software supplier wanting to provide a front end to their customers to be able to explain what’s going on.

The IoT has been providing a bridge to tie these ideas together in order to evolve the transition. The value behind this entire process lies in scaling solutions for different companies based on solutions that they need. By finding solutions in small percentages it could save corporations millions if not billions in efficiency gains. This is being accomplished by examining data from a variety of sources in the rapidly developing market.

Risks Involved For Companies Looking For Big Data Solutions

Right now, there are smaller big data companies in the marketplace who have one-stop fixes for a few scaling solutions. However, many companies are looking for a distinctive new technology that is different from what the average company in the marketplace is offering as it has to cater to their needs in terms of big data. After all, every business has different business functions that make them distinct from their competitors.

Final Thoughts

Right now we are in the birthing period of big data in the digital frontier, and it will be an exciting time to use the bridge of the IoT to plug in missing gaps. In the next couple years, there will be a real opportunity to lead the industry in a new direction by using big data to escalate technology into the edge of the digital spectrum.

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Reskilling is the buzzword in the IT sector.

With the sector seeing huge churn due to automation and protectionism in the western markets, industry lobby group Nasscom’s president R Chandrashekhar told employees in May: Re-skill or perish.

Yes, that’s true. The sector is seeing layoffs and voluntary severances. Companies’ hiring is on the decline. One estimate even puts the likely job loss at a whopping 2 lakh over the next three years.

And in that, the sector is class agnostic. Freshers, middle management or the directors and senior management, as is the case of Cognizant, opt for voluntary separation packages which most IT firms offer employees.

Human Resource (HR) professionals in the information technology services companies sometimes seem to be using cruel means to lay off employees, as was evident from the leaked telephonic conversation between a IT professional in Tech Mahindra and an HR executive.

Clearly, Chandrashekhar’s advice for the IT staff is bang on.

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Typically retrenchment around automation means the company is in a consolidation mode whereby talent with specific skills are given importance. “Those who lost their jobs due to lack of skills may not be absorbed back by the same companies as they will now have to prove their domain expertise again through work experience. A good option for such employees would be seek jobs in product/ internet, SaaS start-ups and global in-house centers (GICs) or become freelance consultants,” says Francis Padamadan, Country Director, KellyOCG India, a talent management solutions provider. Or go in for re-skilling.

According to a survey, Skill acquisition for the Digital Age by Simplilearn, artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics and mobile and software development will be the top technology areas where the need for re-skilling will be the highest. The availability of online courses and certifications has increased exponentially in recent times. Organisations choose them for accessibility of self-paced learning, ease in integration into Learning & Development strategy and availability of updated learning content.

Firstpost spoke to experts in the field to find out what is happening in the re-skilling arena and determine its landscape. Here’s what we found out.

K Nageswara Rao, vice-president, India Technology Center, Unisys, says that the country will need 700 million skilled workforce by 2022 to meet the demands of a growing economy. An important area that has already seen blistering growth is Cyber security. Rao says for security professionals, the median salary packages are already 9 percent higher than other IT professionals, according to Job Market Intelligence. The overall demand for security professionals is expected to reach nearly 6 million jobs in the next two years, making it one of the hottest skills to watch out for in the near future.

Robotics, Internet of Things, blockchain and Xaas (Anything-as-a-Service) are the other areas where demand will shoot up, according to Rao.

While the industry is taking a generational leap in training freshers in new generation technologies along with foundational technologies, the employee segment in the 3-15 year experience bracket is the main target for re-skilling, according to Arun Rajamani, country head, Pluralsight. Technology roles have also evolved today to becoming more multi-dimensional. A web developer today is expected to have expertise in 3-4 different skill areas like UX design, psychology, angular, full stack development. So the re-skilling has to focus on skill analytics to determine what the clusters of skills are today and how learning plans can be tailored to get the employee to a target skill level.

Digital skills are defined differently by companies. Rajamani says there are basically two forms of digital skills: 1) Digital experience-related skills – these skills revolve around designing and implementing digital customer experiences for clients; and 2) digital infrastructure-related skills – these skills can be bucketed into 5 categories linked to modernizing legacy IT infrastructure and IT processes – automation, cloud, devOps, cyber security and data analytics.

For Coursera, the world’s largest open online education i.e. MOOC provider, India is one of its fastest-growing markets and second-largest both in terms of learners and revenue (only after the US). The Coursera platform has over 2 million registered learners in India out of a total of 25 million globally. “We onboard close to 60,000 learners in India every month. We also are already seeing India take a lead in adoption of our enterprise platform that allows companies to partner with us on employee training and development,” said Nikhil Sinha, Chief Business Officer.

The most active learners for Coursera in India are young professionals in their 20s and 30s wanting to gain technical skills. Nearly half of enrollments are in technology domains such as computer science and data science. Since not all students with a job in hand can take time out for studies on a daily basis, Coursera is building a learning platform that makes it as easy as possible for people to fit learning into their busy schedules. For example, you can watch video lectures on your commute, submit assignments on your phone, and get immediate feedback on your code with their new in-browser coding feature.

Udacity, another online portal, found that the maximum demand for online courses in India is from Bangalore closely followed by Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai. Ishan Gupta, MD, Udacity India, said Bangalore contributes the most to advanced skills like deep learning, self-driving cars and artificial intelligence. Delhi wants to learn more of artificial intelligence followed by machine learning and data analyst skills. Mumbai, on the other hand, is looking at machine learning, android and web development. Hyderabad wants to learn deep learning, data analysis and artificial intelligence. Chennai wants to learn data analysis, deep learning and android, while Pune is witnessing maximum search demand for deep learning, followed by android and artificial intelligence.

If you can think/predict what the customer will need that he/she does not know, rest assured you can find the skill — design thinking, the in-demand skill, will ensure you have a job that most companies are seeking. “Companies will hire design thinkers as they can predict what the consumer does not know and hence charge for the product/service from their clients,” says Ashwin Damera, Executive Director, Emeritus Institute of Management, Singapore.

Design thinking is a mindset. IT firms are trying to move up the curve. Higher-end services that companies can charge more is to provide value and for that you need to know that end-customers needs. For example, to provide value services to banking customers is to find out what the bank’s customer needs are in that country the banking client is based. Latent needs come from a design thinking philosophy where you observe customer data, patterns and provide a solution that the customer does not know. Idea in design thinking is to provide agile product creation or solutions.

“We have a popular course called design thinking by MIT which is taught by a professor whose students created Airbnb. Similarly, in a cloud-based model if you can provide the solution to a problem that does not exist then that is what you charge for,” said Damera.

Infosys’s new offering Aikido, formulated by CEO Vishal Sikka, focusses on design thinking, platforms and knowledge-based IT as part of its efforts to return to industry-leading growth numbers. “…Each of these by themselves help enterprises along a great new path, each of these helps bring together and tie together a lot of Infosys services we offer to clients today and together the three of these become even more powerful than the three individually by themselves,” Sikka had said while announcing Aikido.

Everything is changing in the once-buoyant and sunshine IT sector. To be relevant, constantly upgrading one’s skills is the only way to stay aboard.

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