BENGALURU: Courses familiarising undergraduate students with artificial intelligence (AI) and its applications across all disciplines of studies is the need of the hour as technology is poised to play a major role in the near future, Kris Gopalakrishnan, co-founder of Infosys, said on Wednesday. Gopalakrishnan, who is chairman of India Innovation Summit 2018, spoke at length about the role of AI in technology at a curtain raiser for the summit which is scheduled for July 12 and 13. "AI courses should be incorporated at the undergraduate level across all disciplines like humanities and social sciences. AI will be crucial for us and everyone needs to know it to an extent," he said.
The summit this year, with the theme 'India.AI — Driving the Future for the World', will be organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). It will attempt to strengthen the spirit of India to build an ecosystem that fosters and propels innovation through new age technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality (AR) & virtual reality (VR) as the foremost pillar of global growth, a statement from CII said.
There is a growing fear among people that AI will result in people losing jobs. Speaking about this, Gopalakrishnan said, "The government should invest in proper training and skill upgradation of people. This will lead to the creation of more jobs related to AI in the future." The question remains how to incorporate AI courses in colleges across the country. Gopalakrishnan said he feels that the courses should be built in such a way that teachers play the role of the facilitator.
The India Innovation Summit will also have a Young Innovators Challenge. Debarati Sen, Managing Director, 3M India Ltd said that 3M has significantly enhanced the size for the award for the young innovators challenge from 9 lakh prize value last year to 15 lakh this year. Also, this year the challenge has added a new section called ‘Rural Innovations Awards’ to ensure support to ideas working for sustainable rural development.