The Centre will enable the formulation of AI strategies for responsive governance
Giving a boost to the e-Governance strategies driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Centre of Excellence (CoE) of NIC was inaugurated by Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad, Hon'ble Union Minister, Electronics & Information Technology and Law & Justice, at NIC Headquarters, New Delhi, on 10th January 2019. Shri Ajay Sawhney, IAS, Secretary, Dr. Neeta Verma, Director General, NIC, Shri Pankaj Kumar, Additional Secretary, Shri Gopalakrishnan S., AS & FA and JS (Emerging Technologies) and other senior officers from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), were also present on the occasion.
With an aim to work closely with Ministries and Government Departments, CoE has been established to focus on the areas of Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP) & AI in Text, Image Recognition, Speech Recognition & Synthesis, Deep Learning and Chatbot/ Voicebots.
Underscoring the role of AI for an efficient e-Governance, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad said, “CoE in AI is designed to promote innovation in application of AI to take e-Governance services to the next level. NIC has done a few proof of concepts in image analytics as in Swachh Bharat Urban, numeric modelling as in power, text classification and summarisation etc., which will find an echo in similar use cases in other Ministries and Departments.”
“Artificial Intelligence and deep learning can prove to be very helpful in detecting duplication under various e-Governance services, which will help the government save a lot of money”, the Hon’ble Minister added.
A few Proof of Concepts were demonstrated in the AI Lab and a Reference Book on the Use of AI Technologies in eGovernance Application was also released on the occasion.