Tamil Nadu government will soon set up a Centre of Excellence for Artificial Intelligence (AI) with an AI lab infrastructure as part of it, a state official from the state’s Information Technology (IT) department said.

The AI lab and other infrastructure part of this CoE will be offered to startups, academics, and other parties for a subsidised fee to grow research and development around AI, Kumar Jayanth, Additional Chief Secretary, Department of IT and Digital Services, Government of Tamil Nadu said. He was speaking at The Hindu’s AI Summit in Chennai on Thursday.

He explained that Tamil Nadu already uses AI in its governance and for delivery of services to citizens in the areas of healthcare, agriculture, and even for facial recognition-based attendance monitoring of staff. “Despite AI’s benefits, we must keep in mind some concerns in its use such as bias in training datasets and algorithms and also a basic cognitive bias among the people who create AI systems,” he said.

The AI summit is themed ‘From Hype to Hope to Reality: Turning Dreams into Destinies’ and it focuses on real-world adoption of AI across government and private sector. It involves a series of panel discussions and fireside chats featuring AI experts, CXOs, industrialists, bureaucrats, and others.

Talking about how the state is leveraging AI as part of a panel, Supriya Sahu, IAS, Additional Chief Secretary, Department of Health & Family Welfare, highlighted how the state’s health department has been using the technology to screen for Tuberculosis among citizens. “We were happy to note that the rate of detection of TB with AI was twice as precise as traditional methods,” she said.

Amid widespread anxiety around AI taking away jobs of humans, Professor B Ravindran, Head - Data Science & Artificial Intelligence, IIT Madras, said that in reality Generative AI is a decades old concept and not a new phenomenon. “People will not lose their jobs to AI, but they may lose it to those people using AI well,” he added.  

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