Responsible Ai: IIT Madras opens ‘Centre for Responsible AI’, Google joins onboard as member – Times of India

Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) has established a Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI), an interdisciplinary research centre, to ensure ethical and responsible development of AI-based solutions in the real world.
It is geared towards becoming a premier research centre at the national and international level for both fundamental and applied research in Responsible AI with immediate impact in deploying AI systems in the Indian ecosystem. Google is the first platinum consortium member and has contributed a sum of $1 million for this Centre. One of the primary objectives of CeRAI will be to produce high-quality research outputs, such as publishing research articles in high-impact journals/conferences, white papers, and patents, among others. It will work towards creating technical resources such as curated datasets (universal as well as India-specific), software, toolkits, etc., with respect to the domain of Responsible AI.
The Centre also plans to create opportunities for conducting specialized sensitization/training programs for all stakeholders to appreciate the issues of Ethical and Responsible AI in a better manner so as to enable them to contribute meaningfully towards solving problems in respective domains. It will hold a series of technical events in the form of workshops and conferences on specialized themes of deployable AI systems with a strong focus on ethics and responsibility principles that need to be followed.
Towards creating framework for responsible AI in India
The Centre for Responsible AI conducted its first workshop on ‘Responsible AI for India’ on May 15. Addressing the inaugural session of this workshop, Abhishek Singh, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Digital India Corporation, said, “I am sure that the deliberations that will happen today in this workshop and the various panel discussions will go a long way in helping us evolve our framework, our guidelines and our policies for responsible AI.”
Singh added, “AI is playing a major role in all our lives. Whether we know it or not, every day we are using AI-based technologies in some part of our life. It is very important that those at the policymaking level and those who are working at the cutting-edge of developing technologies are aware of the risks and challenges that remain while we are using the same technologies for solving societal problems, ensuring access to healthcare, making healthcare more affordable and making education more inclusive and making agriculture more productive… There is a need for non-biased and non-discriminatory AI framework as we have unique requirements that require customization as per our requirements.”
Commenting on the CeRAI coming up at IIT Madras, Sanjay Gupta, Google’s Country Head and Vice President, India, said, “As India’s digital ecosystems increasingly adopt and leverage AI, we are committed to sharing the best practices we have been developing since 2018 when we began championing responsible AI. To help build a foundation of fairness, interpretability, privacy, and security, we are supporting the establishment of a first-of-its-kind multidisciplinary Center for Responsible AI with a grant of $1 million to the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.”
Highlighting the need for such centres, Prof. V Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras, said, “We have now reached a stage where we have to assign responsibility to AI tools and interpret the reasons for the output the AI gives. Aspects of human augmentation, biased data sets, risk of leakage of collected data and the introduction of new policies besides substantial research must be addressed. There is a growing need for trust to be built around AI and it is crucial to bring about the notion of privacy. AI will not take away jobs as long as domain interpretation exists.”