Aim is to make Hyderabad as top global innovation hub: KTR

Hyderabad: Information Technology (IT) Minister K T Rama Rao said that the aim of the government was to establish Hyderabad as one of the top 25 global innovation hubs.

Speaking at the launch of a series of initiatives related to AI here, the minister said that AI could address complex problems beyond the capability of traditional methods and would be useful for the government to transform lives of citizens.

"AI will be our focus for the coming year and beyond. This event today will set in motion a slew of initiatives, which will potentially make the next ten years as Telangana's decade of AI. Telangana is ready to capture the global AI opportunity," said Rama Rao.

The minister further said the government would play a key role in promoting a high impact research focused on solving national-level societal problems related to healthcare, agriculture, smart mobility, climate change and e-governance.

The government would also work on 'Industrialising AI' by encouraging start-ups.

The minister stated the government had launched the open data policy and published data related to 20 departments on the open data platform and Hyderabad was the first to come out with mobility datasets in 2018 in partnership with Intel and IIIT-H. He said availability of quality talent pool was critical for the success of any technology and was a big differentiator, especially in the field of AI.

Quoting the report of NASSCOM, Rama Rao said there would be need of about 2.3 lakh data scientists and AI professionals in India and there would be 19 different job roles in AI.

"We have premier institutes like IIIT-H, IIT-H and BITS offering various programmes ranging from short term courses to undergraduate and graduate programmes in AI.

Additionally, the Telangana Academy for Skill and Knowledge (TASK) is offering faculty development programmes, theme-based hackathons and certification programmes in Applied AI.

Data preparation and engineering tasks accounted for more than 80 per cent of the time involved in most AI and machine-learning projects, he said, adding that there was huge opportunity for back office operations in AI which can be carried out in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.