Start-ups shine at Karnataka, NASSCOM’s ‘AI for Good’ program

In the Government of Karnataka (GoK) and NASSCOM’s ‘AI for Good’ Program, the following companies are the winners: Intello Labs and Mycrop Technologies in agriculture sector, Jungroo Learning in education sector, DataGlen Technologies and Vinfinet Technologies for IoT/AI solutions, in the governance sector, Surajya Services and Voxta Communications. In the Health Sector, Tricog Health and Aindra Systems. In the transport and safety sector, Netradyne.

The Centre of Excellence for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, an initiative of the Karnataka Government and NASSCOM on Monday announced the winners.

Applications were invited from Indian citizens, companies, institutions, academia of all sizes, registered across India, for use of AI to solve public issues across the fields of agriculture, education, healthcare, traffic, transportation and safety, governance and service delivery and public utilities.

The AI for Good program received close to 200 submissions from 155 companies including start-ups and some of the biggest names in the industry. Among the top 25 shortlisted companies, 10 companies across the six domains were chosen as winners who will be recognized as innovators impacting society, with an opportunity for scaling up and funding.

Commenting on the initiative, Gaurav Gupta, Karnataka Principal Secretary, Department of IT, BT and S&T, said, “AI for Good was initiated during the end of last year. The idea was to identify intelligent solutions that can help address key issues in areas of public importance for better governance, risk management and sustainable development. It is encouraging to see the kind of ideas and solutions that were presented to the jury leveraging various emerging technologies including AI, Analytics, IoT, Computer Vision, Robotics, AR, VR etc. It was quite a task for the jury to choose the winners.”

He added “‘AI for Good’ reflects the commitment of the Karnataka Government in making people’s lives better through effective adoption of technology. We believe emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence will bring the benefits of innovation to make a huge positive societal impact and lead to sustainable development not only in Karnataka but entire India.”

Debjani Ghosh, President NASSCOM said, “Artificial Intelligence has found applications across industries whether financial services, manufacturing, healthcare and retail to name a few. Equally essential to these, the application of AI in the public sector and governance is expanding and thus impacting every aspect of daily lives. We are happy to partner with the Karnataka Government in its commendable strategic initiative to focus on innovation in artificial intelligence to bring about a positive impact on our society. Through this initiative, we will unwrap the unlimited possibilities of deploying AI for Good as well as enable innovators to build models which will validate India on the global AI map.”