Indians Are Major Contributors To The AI Ecosystem, Says Google's Fei-Fei Li

[caption id="attachment_26915" align="aligncenter" width="1200"] File photo of Google's Fei-Fei Li. (Image source: TED Talks)[/caption] Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist at Google Cloud AI and Machine Learning, reinforced last week what Indians have known for a very long time. Speaking at on the sidelines of Google Cloud Next 2018 conference in San Francisco, Li told a leading daily that Indians are contributing immensely to the artificial intelligence ecosystem. “Indian students globally are contributing a lot to AI and some of my close personal mentors are also of Indian origin... So, I think India is contributing a lot to the global AI scene," said Li. Many noted names such as late physicist Stephen Hawking and Tesla CEO Elon Musk have are sounding the alarm bells with regards to AI and its potential harm. Li, on the other hand, thinks the matter is a part of evolution. “Every time we invent and innovate with the goal of making lives better, we face new challenges throughout every wave of industrial revolution and AI is no exception... However, because of the computer, new jobs also emerged,” she told the newspaper. Li also talked about the problem of fake news staring in the face of India as a nation. She reportedly said that AI as a technology could be directed towards solving this problem. “There is ongoing research in the AI community on fake news and it is an important effort. Just like AI and NLP have been used to call out gender inequality in Hollywood, that women are less represented, I think it’s a great use of the technology to deliver a positive message. I hope that NLP can contribute to the problem of fake news as well," said Li. Earlier this June, Google had launched the Google News Initiative Training Network in India in partnership with BoomLive, DataLeads and Internews. The training network aimed at supporting journalists from across India in their fight against misinformation, providing in-depth and hands-on verification training to 8,000 journalists across English and six other Indian languages.