Google Announces 6 AI-based Research Projects in India

By Apac CIO Outlook | Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Google had announced the Google Research India project in its Google for India event last year. In one of the first official developments since then, the research giant announced its support for six research projects which will be led by organizations from India and all across Asia

Fremont, CA: Google, the global search giant, started Google Research India, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) based research projects that would focus on addressing social, environmental, and humanitarian challenges in prominent sectors such as healthcare, conversation, disaster prevention, and education.

Google had announced the Google Research India project in its Google for India event last year. The company also revealed then that, the projects will be carried out in its AI-based labs at Bengaluru. In one of the first official developments since then, Google announced the support for six research projects which will be led by organizations from India and across Asia. Each project of Google Research India will get funding and computational resources, besides the supporting efforts from expertise in natural language processing, computer vision, deep learning techniques, etc.

"We are increasingly seeing people apply AI to address big challenges. Therefore, we have made research in AI for Social Good one of the key focus areas of Google Research India -- the AI lab we started in Bengaluru last year in September," said Manish Gupta, Director, Google Research Team, India.

The details of the six shortlisted research projects are

HIV/AIDS Research

HIV/AIDS Research will be carried out to improve health information for high HIV/AIDS risk communities. The team comprises of a group from IIT Delhi led by Tavpritesh Sethi, a team from Singapore Management University led by Pradeep Varakantham, and nonprofit Swasti.

Predicting Risks for Pregnant Women

Nonprofit Armann and a team of researchers from IIT Madras led by Balaram Ravindran will research using AI to predict the risk of expectant mothers dropping out of health care programs. The research targets to improve the interventions and increase positive healthcare outcomes for mothers and the new-borns.

Healthcare Information Input

The research aims to improve consistency in how healthcare information is captured and monitored with the help of AI. A team from Singapore Management University led by Arunesh Sinha and nonprofit Khushibaby will carry out this project.

Human-Wildlife Conflict

A team from nonprofit Wildlife Conservation Trust and from Singapore Management University led by Pradeep Varakantham will use AI to predict human-wildlife conflict in Maharashtra to help inform data-driven policymaking.

Vernacular Content

Open-Source input tools for underserved Indian languages will be built to accelerate the publishing of openly licensed content. This will be carried out by nonprofit Storyweaver, along with teams from AI4Bharat and IIT Madras led by Mitesh Khapra and Pratyush Kumar.

Dam and Barrage Water Release

The team of Nanyang Technology University led by Bo An and nonprofit Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology & The Environment will apply AI to build early warning systems to inform dam and barrage water releases that minimize the risk of disasters.