The grant from Google will bring together experts to study all aspects of responsible AI.
The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, will receive a grant worth $1 million from Google, to set up a first-of-its-kind multi-disciplinary centre for research and development on responsible artificial intelligence (AI).
The Centre for Responsible AI will conduct research on various aspects of bias in artificial intelligence. Backed by the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBC-DSAI), the Centre will be headed by Prof. B Ravindran.
He highlighted the need for establishing the Centre. “With the rise in the development and deployment of AI systems, it is essential to establish responsible guidelines to ensure fair, ethical and safe usage of AI-based solutions. There is a need to develop technology that is understandable to the end users, providing strong safety and performance guarantees, and to raise awareness of the impact of the technology on society.”
He added that this was a first-of-its-kind initiative in India that brought together technologists, sociologists, policy and legal experts from academia, industry and the government to study all aspects of responsible AI.
In its company statement, Google explained the challenge faced by responsible AI was to mitigate bias, particularly against women, who have long been inadequately or unfairly represented in society. It added that it intended to train natural language processing models to evaluate and mitigate gender bias, along with various other types of discrimination relevant to India. “We plan to make our models open source, so we can work with industry to scale our collective efforts and support faster progress,” the company wrote on its blog.
