BENGALURU: An AI and Robotics Technologies Park (ARTPARK ) set up by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) here will work towards enabling development of technologies and products along with significant participation in line with India’s push for self reliance.
The new park will promote technology innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics leading to societal impact by executing mission mode R&D projects in healthcare, education, mobility, infrastructure, agriculture, retail and cybersecurity focusing on problems unique to India.
Set up as a not-for-profit foundation by IISc with support from AI Foundry, a venture studio building an idea-to-impact AI innovation ecosystem, ARTPARK is a public-private model.
While the Department of Science and Technology (DST) will provide Rs 170 crore as seed funding, Karnataka IT minister CN Ashwath Narayan said at an interaction with TOI that the state would provide Rs 60 crore over the next five years.
The DST, which is funding the park as part of its national mission on interdisciplinary cyber-physical systems (NM-ICPS), said this “will bring about a collaborative consortium of partners from industry, academia and government bodies. ARTPARK will lead to cutting edge innovations in terms of new technologies, standards, products, services and intellectual properties.”
This also sets a template of centre-state partnership in the frontier areas of technology — a theme which will receive focus in the soon to be released Science, Technology and Innovation Policy 2020, said Prof Ashutosh Sharma, secretary, DST.
“Indian academia has been carrying out cutting edge technology research in various domains. However, we have had systemic issues in moving the results of this research from university labs into the outside world. ARTPARK would go a long way in establishing a template for addressing this need,” Prof. Govindan Rangarajan, director IISc, said.
The DST said that the park will develop AI and Robotics facilities to support technology innovations as well as capacity building through advanced skills training of students and professionals in these areas.
“Some of these facilities will be key enablers for whole new sets of technologies, products and services. It will develop DataSetu that will enable confidentiality and privacy-preserving framework to share data and run analytics spurring the data-sharing ecosystem and create a data marketplace, boosting AI applications and solutions,” DST said.
It added that another service, BhashaSetu will enable real-time Indic language translation, both of speech to speech and speech to text. This will further unlock the economic potential of the country, and enable all Indian citizens to equitably participate in the economic progress, regardless of their language.
Prof Bharadwaj Amrutur, research head and director, ARTPARK explained that this initiative was a natural evolution of the Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber Physical Systems, an interdisciplinary research and academic centre at IISc, with funding from the Bosch group of companies.