CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu will be offering insights into its initiatives in Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Friday during the global virtual summit on Responsible AI for Social Empowerment or RAISE 2020 in New Delhi.

Santosh Mishra, Chief Executive Officer of the Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency (TNeGA), told The New Indian Express that only Tamil Nadu and Telangana have been given slots on highlighting their initiatives in Artificial Intelligence during the global summit.

“We have been given a two-hour slot where Information Technology Minister R B Udaya Kumar would be highlighting the state’s initiatives in tapping Artificial Intelligence as well as becoming the first state to come out with ethical AI, cybersecurity and blockchain policies. We will also be having a panel discussion during the event,” said Mishra.

Additional chief secretary Hans Raj Verma, who heads the Information Technology department along with Mishra, Sridhar Vembu, chief executive officer of Zoho Corporation, Raj Cherubal, chief executive officer of Chennai Smart City, Jitender Singh Minhas, CEO IAMAI Start-up Foundation, Dr Ashfaq Bhat, Director of Norway India Partnership Initiative (NIPI) and Tathagato Rao Dastidar, CEO of Sig-Tupple will be participating in the discussion which focuses on Artificial Intelligence in governance.

Interestingly, this comes after Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad appreciated Tamil Nadu for bringing out policies on ethical Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity during RAISE 2020, which was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday.

Tamil Nadu has been using Artificial Intelligence on pest identification in agriculture, said Mishra adding that it is benefitting five lakh farmers. “We have been using artificial intelligence-based pest identification in crops which was developed in-house and integrated into the Uzhavan app,” he said.

Under this, a farmer can take a picture of the crop affected by pests and upload it on the app. Following this, agriculture department officials will come out with a solution, he added.

The other major successful project using artificial intelligence is marking attendance of government school students using facial recognition system. The project helped in saving time of teachers in marking attendance, said Mishra.

Similarly, the state has also come out with a Tamil chatbot named Anil (squirrel in Tamil). Mishra said using Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence technology development in collaboration with Anna University, the chatbot will guide and advise people on services offered by various government departments.

RAISE 2020, the biggest artificial intelligence summit, seeks global collaboration for the development of an artificial intelligence ecosystem that is responsible for humanity and committed towards social empowerment.

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In a first-of-its-kind initiative, the Tamil Nadu government is working on a policy for safe and ethical use of artificial intelligence (AI). It will set certain parameters that will need to be fulfilled before rolling out AI-based solutions, especially for the government. According to a senior state government official, a policy on Blockchain is also expected to be released soon.

“This is going to be the world’s first safe and ethical Policy for AI (by a government),” said Santosh K Misra, CEO of the Tamil Nadu E-Governance Agency, and commissioner of e-governance, in the Tamil Nadu government.

“While new technologies open up huge opportunities, they can also throw some big surprises. Governments and private institutions roll out these technologies in their domain. If they have not completely understood the pitfalls therein, there can be massive disasters. That is what we are countering by bringing out this policy,” he added. However, he refused to divulge more on the policy, adding that chances were that it might be released next week in the Connect 2019 event.

Announcing the schedule for the Connect 2019 event, he said the flagship annual ICT Conference and Exhibition organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in partnership with the Tamil Nadu government was focusing on the theme ‘Technology @ Heart of India’s $5-Trillion Economy’ this time.

The policy is expected to help the state government implement AI and blockchain in public administration and service. There will be seven parameters under the AI policy, and procurement would be based on the solutions meeting these parameters.

The government has also developed an AI system using the face-recognition attendance system in schools and has put it to use in two schools in Chennai. It is expected to soon roll out this technology at all government schools across the state. The move is expected to save 45 minutes of school hours every day. Face recognition has been developed by the state government internally, according to Misra, and its accuracy is 99.8 per cent.

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