Teacher seminar on Artificial Intelligence at FICCI

Artificial Intelligence (AI), sometimes called machine intelligence, is intelligence demonstrated by machines in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans. Artificial Intelligence has become an important part of our daily living. It has changed our lives by speeding our work and giving us accurate results.

To keep pace with the changing times, Dr. Anu Singh, Ms. Simranjeet Kaur and Ms. VandanaTewari of The Indian School along with numerous others from several schools, were accorded an opportunity to attend a seminar organised by FICCI on AI on 3 July 2019.

The seminar aimed at highlighting the opportunities and challenges for students and faculty through Future Talks, Capacity Building and Immersion Programmes. It was a great initiative by FICCI to bring together experts from various fields who shared their experiences to create a future-ready society.

Mr. Bijay Sahoo, Co-Chairperson for Skills Development Committee, FICCI, Ms. Nivruti Rai, Country Head, Intel India and Dr. M.P. Punia, Vice-Chairman, AICTE delivered a talk on AI and shared their experiences about the challenges faced in its implementation and how these were overcome.

Ms. Nivruti Rai commenced the afternoon session by defining the new buzz word Artificial Intelligence and how the technology originated in the late 1950s. She discussed the role of AI in driving a paradigm shift in technology leading to an industrial revolution known as Industry 4.0. She said that Artificial Intelligence is nothing else but collecting and filtering data, stitching it into a model, analysing and making inferences.

Ms. Rai also spoke about the coherence between AI and Cloud and clarified the difference between Machine and Deep Learning. She further added that Image Processing and Speech Recognition techniques are heavily used in AI. She concluded by giving examples of various domains where AI deployment has been fruitful such as Healthcare, Agriculture, E-governance and Mobility and how leveraging data can aid the economic transformation of India.

It was insightful to learn from the experiences of Dr. Punia- how teachers should equip students to meet the challenges of the future by enabling them to think critically, make decisions and be able to solve problems. This is possible if we give them autonomy to make decisions and take responsibility for their actions.

The session concluded with a question and answer round followed by lunch. Overall it was a learning experience to see how technology, if used effectively can be a boon and increase the productivity of humans. It broke the myth that humans will be replaced by machines in the years to come as technology is created by humans to leverage their work load and not vice-versa.