IndiaAI Mission Selects 8 Projects to Advance Ethical AI Development

The union government has selected eight strategic projects to promote responsible development, deployment and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in the country.

As part of the “Safe and Trusted AI Pillar” of the IndiaAI Mission, the government received 2,000 proposals in response to its expression of interest (EoI). These projects aim to address the challenges of bias in AI, enhance privacy, and establish frameworks for explainable and trustworthy AI.

“… India is committed to invest in agile mechanisms for developing indigenous governance tools, frameworks, and guidelines that are based on Indian datasets and reflect its unique challenges, opportunities, and datasets. To support this vision, IndiaAI has issued an EoI to promote responsible AI projects across a range of critical themes…,” the electronics and IT ministry said in a statement. 

In total, eight projects have been selected across various themes such as machine unlearning, synthetic data generation, AI bias mitigation, ethical AI frameworks, privacy-enhancing tools, explainable AI, AI governance testing, and algorithm auditing tools.

The following are the projects which have been selected: 

1. Machine Unlearning: Focusses on developing techniques to remove learned data from AI models, improving data privacy and fairness.
2. Synthetic Data Generation: Aims to generate synthetic data and mitigate bias in machine learning pipelines for responsible AI.
3. AI Bias Mitigation Strategy: It focuses on reducing biases in AI models used in healthcare, promoting fair treatment for all users.
4. Explainable AI Framework: It works on developing explainable AI models that are privacy-preserving, particularly for security applications.
5. Privacy Enhancing Strategy: It aims to build machine learning models that prioritise user privacy while maintaining robust performance.
6. AI Ethical Certification Framework: It develops tools to assess the fairness of AI models, ensuring ethical standards in AI deployment.
7. AI Algorithm Auditing Tool: It focuses on creating a toolkit for auditing AI algorithms to ensure accountability and transparency.
8. AI Governance Testing Framework : It aims to create governance tools for managing large language models with a focus on transparency and risk assessment.

The projects are part of the INR 10,372 Cr IndiaAI Mission, which was approved by the union cabinet earlier this year. The mission focusses on seven areas – computing, foundational models, datasets, applications, skill development, startups, and safe AI.

This comes at a time when the government has been actively pushing for rapid adoption of AI, with an eye on streamlining access to government services and digital public goods.

Additionally, Minister of State (MoS) for Electronics and Information Technology Jitin Prasada recently said that the government has constituted an advisory group to formulate a framework to regulate AI.

Notably, IndiaAI Mission also launched AI Innovation Challenge last month under which the winning team will receive an award of up to INR 1 Cr and a “contract” to deploy their solution in government departments for four years.

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