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Why India needs AI to work for agriculture, healthcare and education
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SME Times News Bureau | 16 May, 2018
While the Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is making its presence
felt across the spectrum globally, India needs to prioritise AI-based
predictive analysis to improve outcomes in three core areas --
agriculture, healthcare and education, a top Microsoft executive has
emphasised.
The initial results in India are promising and if
deployed at big scale, AI-based models can help farmers, doctors and
educators keep building success stories, Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice
President of Cloud AI Platform at Microsoft, told IANS here.
"For
example, AI can help us foresee signs of a student being at risk of
dropping out. We have done first such experiment in Andhra Pradesh
involving thousands of students," Sirosh informed.
In 2017, the Andhra Pradesh government expanded the rollout of the experiment to all 13 districts in the state.
In
Visakhapatnam district, an application powered by Azure Cloud Machine
Learning (ML) processed the data pertaining to all students -- based on
parameters such as gender, socio-economic demographics, academic
performance, school infrastructure and teacher skills -- to find
predictive patterns.
The results showed that some of the factors
leading to students dropping out were insufficient furniture, inadequate
toilet infrastructure, etc.
Based on these results, the state
government identified about 19,500 probable dropouts from government
schools in Visakhapatnam district in the next academic year (2018-19).
"Not
just India, AI-based predictive analysis has also helped Tacoma School
District here in Washington state improve graduation rate from under 60
per cent to over 83 per cent by managing dropouts," Sirosh noted.
When
it comes to agriculture, Microsoft, in collaboration with the
non-profit International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid
Tropics (ICRISAT), has developed an AI-sowing app for farmers in India.
The
tech giant is using AI and historic weather data to predict the best
time for sowing seeds and other stages of the farming process, and pass
on that information to farmers via SMS.
"We have done some
amazing work, like informing farmers when to sow crops, what is the best
time to plant crops during the year, etc. The result is 30 per cent
more yield," Sirosh told IANS.
The farmers do not need to install
any sensors in their fields or incur any capital expenditure. All they
need is a mobile phone capable of receiving text messages.
To
determine the optimal sowing period, the Moisture Adequacy Index (MAI)
is calculated. MAI is the standardised measure used for assessing the
degree of adequacy of rainfall and soil moisture to meet the potential
water requirement of crops.
The data then is downscaled to build predictability and guide farmers to pick the ideal sowing week.
According
to Microsoft, ICRISAT has scaled sowing insights in 2018 to 4,000
farmers across Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka for the Kharif crop cycle
(rainy season).
"We have made AI-based applications very simple
for common people to comprehend. They don't need to be
tech-sophisticated. We have simplified the technology for the
end-users," Sirosh added.
The company has also developed a
multi-variate agricultural commodity price forecasting model to predict
future commodity arrival and the corresponding prices.
The model uses remote sensing data from geostationary satellite images to predict crop yields through every stage of farming.
According
to the company, the model, currently being used to predict the prices
of "tur" pulse, is scalable and can be generalised to other regions and
crops.
On the health front, the Telangana government has adopted
Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare (MINE), which was developed in
partnership with Hyderabad-based LV Prasad Eye Institute.
MINE
uses ML and advanced analytics to predict regression rates for eye
operations, enabling doctors to pinpoint the procedures needed to
prevent and treat visual impairments.
"Under the MINE global
consortium, we have built AI models that are very accurate for eyecare,
especially for children," Sirosh said.
The Telangana government
is using Microsoft's Cloud-based advanced analytics solution to screen
children from birth to 18 years of age for major conditions affecting
their health.
"We are also working hard to improve citizen
services in India by creating user-friendly application programming
interfaces (APIs) for enhanced speech recognition and translation
solutions," Sirosh added.
People are just starting to understand the power of AI-enabled Cloud in India.
"Our
partners like TCS, Wipro, Infosys, Cognizant and Accenture are leaning
in and adopting AI. These are exciting times for AI and its real
adoption in the country," Sirosh said.
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