Centre for Internet and Society

Dialogues on AI - Ethics of AI for India

pranav — 2018-07-01T07:01:58Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) organized the first session of the "Dialogues on AI" Roundtables in collaboration with Facebook on April 27, 2018 at Omidyar Network office in Bengaluru.

Sunil Abraham moderated one of the three sessions, and the event saw a total of 24 participants from industry, academia, law/policy, and civil society. Ambika Tandon, Shweta Mohandas, and Pranav Manjesh Bidare also attended the event.

Ethics of AI for India

Facebook and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) jointly present the first in a national series of roundtables focussing on emerging policy, ethical, and governance concerns relating to Artificial Intelligence (AI) in India. These roundtables aim to stimulate the discourse in India by providing curated, closed-door settings for a diverse group of experts to come together to advance the Indian AI narrative.

The first roundtable – in Bangalore – is designed to draw from the extensive regional expertise available in India’s technology hub and serve as a broader foundation for future roundtables. With the abundance of AI talent in the region, we have designed this first interaction to address several foundational yet critical questions surrounding AI. We hope that this discussion and learnings from it will serve as a key base and starting point for future discourse – intellectually driven from Bangalore – and will lay benchmarks for subsequent development and thought leadership in the area.

The roundtable focused on three key threads:

AI – Evolving a Common Terminology: This thread will aim to provide a primer to the AI revolution and help newcomers and experienced professionals alike evolve a common framework and taxonomy to guide policy discussions, research, and future discourse. Discussions will look to distil conceptual clarity on topics like artificial intelligence v. machine learning v. deep learning and provide technical and philosophical foundations to those from diverse fields.
AI Ethics: This thread will aim to stimulate and provoke discussion on the ethical norms that must underpin research, development, and the use of AI. Specific issues for discussion include openness, transparency, privacy, and moral issues. We expect a key part of this discussion will revolve around questions of whether specific laws or regulations are required to account for questions posed by AI in its various forms.
AI for India: The last thread of this discussion will aim to transition the debate on ethics and policy towards the application realm. Specifically, this discussion will look to focus on how the Indian public and private sector actors can capitalise on developments in AI to drive social and economic change. From a governance point of view, we will also look to cover how AI can be used to tackle key challenges in public distribution, law and order, regulation, and defence. We expect that key questions will revolve around deployment of AI towards governance, service delivery, manufacturing, and the effect of AI on employment.

Event Primer

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/dialogues-on-ai-ethics-of-ai-for-india

Roundtable on A.I. and Governance in India

pranav — 2018-04-20T07:41:21Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore is organizing a roundtable on ‘A.I. and Governance in India' at India Islamic Cultural Centre in New Delhi on March 16, 2018 from 10.00 a.m. to 1.30 p.m.

Download the Event Report

The Roundtable seeks to discuss the various issues and challenges surrounding the design, development and use of AI in Governance (including law enforcement and legal institutions).

In line with the changing times, the government, as well as its agencies, have started using technology and digitization to make governance more efficient and accessible. For example,through its flagship project Digital India, the Indian government has undertaken digitization and revamping of systems related to railways, land records, educational resource etc. As the government pursues its digital agenda, artificial intelligence can be a tool for efficiency and decision making. To realize the potential of AI, a clear understanding of the technology and how it can and should be used is necessary. The first step towards a robust AI policy is a sound Information and Communication Technology (ICT) policy that lays the edifice for algorithmic decision making using AI.

Though the adoption of AI in the public sector is still in its nascent stages, the government of India is taking various steps to increase the scale of adoption. The Union Ministry of Commerce and Industry has constituted a task force on AI to facilitate India's economic transformation. This year’s Union Budget also recognised the need for government investment in research, training and skill development in robotics, AI, digital manufacturing, Big Data intelligence and Quantum communications. Though the adoption of AI in the public sector is still in its nascent stages, the government of India is taking various steps to increase the scale of adoption. The Union Ministry of Commerce and Industry has constituted a task force on AI to facilitate India's economic transformation. This year’s Union Budget also recognised the need for government investment in research, training and skill development in robotics, AI, digital manufacturing, Big Data intelligence and Quantum communications.

Our research on the application of AI in Indian governance aims to examine five broad sectors of application: law enforcement, discharge of governmental functions, defense,judicial/administrative decision making, and education. A few of the existing government research initiatives identified by CIS include the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) hosted by the Indian Defense Research and Development Organization which focuses on research and development of ICT solutions for defense, and the Ministry of Finance’s use of geospatial analytics for their economic survey on human settlements. There are already instances where government bodies are using AI, an example being the case of the Indian Police force, which is revamping its investigation procedures by using Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. The Delhi police has already started using data and analytics to control crime. In the field of agriculture too, the Indian government has partnered with Microsoft to use AI to improve crop production.

While AI can aid governance in numerous ways, there needs to be a system of checks and balances in order to ensure effectiveness, transparency, and accountability. Hence,governance mechanisms must be able to ensure inclusiveness, while minimising the risks that might arise with the use of the technology. Experts have also predicted that, as the government incorporates AI into specific areas of governance- such as service delivery, it will simultaneously need to incorporate it into broader policy structures such as cyber security and the national education framework.

The process of designing a governance ecosystem is a complex one, and AI poses several pre-existing ethical and legal for each application within this ecosystem. The effectiveness ofAI and Machine learning inherently depends on the availability of data, and it is predicted that the most imminent challenge will also involve the same, especially as India becomesincreasingly data dense and the government is entrusted with its citizens’ data. These challenges could range from the collection, storage, and use of data, to having to answerquestions of fairness, safety, and prevention of misuse. This roundtable seeks to deliberate on these questions and more so as to understand how to optimise the use of AI ingovernance for the public interest. In doing so, the roundtable will use preliminary research that CIS has undertaken into the use of AI and governance in India as an entry point into broader discussions on the challenges and benefits and way forward for AI.

Agenda

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/roundtable-on-a-i-and-governance-in-india

Vacancies at CIS

pranav — 2024-09-10T14:44:45Z

Call for applications: Public Interest Technologist

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/jobs/vacancies