The tech giant Google, recently, started six Artificial Intelligence (AI) based research projects in India in an effort to focus on addressing social, humanitarian and environmental challenges in sectors like healthcare, education, disaster prevention, and conservation.

As noted by Hindustan Times, Google Research India will provide each team with funding and computational resources in addition to supporting the efforts with expertise in computer vision, natural language processing, and other deep learning techniques.

"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.

Healthcare

Moreover, the six projects are improving health information for high HIV/AIDS risk communities from the team from IIT Delhi led by Tavpritesh Sethi, a team from Singapore Management University led by Pradeep Varakantham and nonprofit Swasti.

A team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M) led by Balaraman Ravindran and nonprofit Armman will use AI to predict the risk of expectant mothers dropping out of healthcare programmes, to improve targeted interventions and increase positive healthcare outcomes for mothers and their babies.

Also, the team from Singapore Management University led by Arunesh Sinha and nonprofit Khushibaby will apply AI to help ensure consistency in how healthcare information is captured and monitored.

Wildlife

Another team from Singapore Management University led by Pradeep Varakantham along with nonprofit Wildlife Conservation Trust will use AI to predict human-wildlife conflict in the state of Maharashtra to help inform data-driven policymaking.

Disaster-Management

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

Under-served India Languages Content

The last team from AI4Bharat and IIT Madras led by Mitesh Khapra and Pratyush Kumar along with nonprofit Storyweaver will build open-source input tools for underserved Indian languages to accelerate publishing of openly licensed content.

Academics

"We look forward to supporting academic researchers, organizations and the broader community over the coming months and years to bring these projects to life," said Milind Tambe, Director, AI for Social Good, Google Research Team, India.

As we can see India is becoming a hub for Google-charged advancements, the country is likely to see some more tech-innovations for a social cause in the coming years.

A number of leaders and experts in India have been reciting about the potential use of AI for addressing Indian socio-economic challenges. While a lot of organizations are working in this space currently, tech giant Google has come forward for the cause to improve the lives of millions. Citing that some of the issues faced by India, can be tackled with AI, Google said that Google Research India the company is looking to solve a few of them with its Google Research India lab. Notably, this AI lab was established by Google at Bengaluru in September 2019.