IndiaAI Mission: Centre selects 8 projects for driving ethical AI development

In March 2024, the Union Cabinet approved the Rs 10738 crore IndiaAI Mission

The Centre, as part of the Rs 10,738 crore IndiaAI Mission, Wednesday selected eight projects intending to drive ethical development of artificial intelligence in India

These projects were chosen from over 2,000 proposals submitted in response to an Expression of Interest (EoI) issued under the "Safe and Trusted AI" pillar of the mission.

This vertical of the government's AI initiative aims to address critical themes such as bias mitigation, privacy, and AI governance.

Other pillars include building a high-end computing ecosystem with over 10,000 GPUs, developing cutting-edge AI models for India and so on.

Also read: IndiaAI Mission: Govt relaxes norms for 10,000 GPU tender, to benefit smaller players

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Jodhpur will focus on "machine unlearning" in generative foundation models. Machine unlearning is a technique that allows models to "forget" or remove specific training data points without needing to be retrained from scratch.

IIT Roorkee will work on "generating synthetic data to mitigate bias in datasets", while the National Institute of Technology (NIT) Raipur will develop strategies to address bias in healthcare systems.

The Defence Institute of Advanced Technology (DIAT) in Pune with Hyderabad-based Mindgraph Technology, will create a framework "enabling explainable and privacy-preserving AI for security".

Meanwhile, IIT Delhi, in partnership with IIT Dharwad, IIIT Delhi, and the Telecommunication Engineering Center (TEC), will work on developing privacy-preserving machine learning models.

In addition, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Delhi, working with TEC, will create tools to assess the fairness of AI models under the project named "Nishpaksh."

Civic Data Labs has been selected to develop ParakhAI, an open-source toolkit for algorithm auditing. Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, in collaboration with TEC, will work on Track-LLM, a framework for transparency and risk assessment of large language models.

In March, the government approved the Rs 10,732-crore IndiaAI Mission to create computing infrastructure in the country, AI centres for multi-modal LLMs, procuring 10,000 graphics processing units and more.