Start-ups incubated at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras (IIT-Madras) have set the Guinness Record with 112,314 people taking part in an online event called ‘AI for India’. The initiative, which took place last month, aimed to upskill Indians in Python, a programming language. They set the record for ‘most numbers of users to take a programming lesson in 24 hours,’ beating the previous record by 50 times.
According to a report, as many as 143,000 users took part in the online training session to build a face recognition application during the same event. The programme was conducted by start-ups GUVI and the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), in association with the IIT-Madras Research Park and healthcare revenue cycle automation platform BUDDI.AI. It was targeted at students, IT professionals, and anyone in the age group of 8 to 80 years interested in coding.
Students and working professionals from all parts of the country, from the urban centres to those in remote villages, worked on their mobile phones and laptops to take programming lessons in Python. With the pandemic halting in-person classes, students and professionals in these villages arranged a dozen streaming devices to attend a free online workshop based on artificial intelligence.
India has 300 million students, almost the entire population of the United States, and already, the Central Board of Senior Secondary Education (CBSE) has introduced AI in the curriculum. There is an ecosystem for innovation, entrepreneurship, and learning, and the rise of this has to come through accelerators. There are many applications for AI in agriculture and the automotive industry, from parking vehicles to manufacturing.
The host of the workshop guided the participants on how to build a facial recognition app from scratch. Unlike regular IT workshops, the medium of instruction was in three Vernacular languages besides English – Tamil, Telugu, and Hindi.
The startup also announced that the courses on Python and face recognition technology will be offered for free for learning until the end of May. The certification for that Python course will be available on paying a minimal fee of IN 1,770 (US$24) as it is issued by IIT-Madras.
Recently OpenGov Asia reported that IIT-Madras researchers have developed ‘BlockTrack’, a blockchain-based secure medical data and information exchange system for a mobile phone-based application. The application, which is the first of its kind, is currently being field-tested at the institute’s hospital.
BlockTrack aims to securely digitise healthcare information systems while ensuring the protection of sensitive personal information and medical records. It does this by decentralising the control and ownership of patient data, through a blockchain-based innovation. The BlockTrack innovation is now protected through a provisional IP filed with the Indian Patent Office.
The Android version has been developed separately for patients and doctors. It opens up universal and transferable healthcare information management and emphasises data privacy and tracking the spread of infectious diseases across geographies.
It allows the interoperability of systems from multiple hospitals, institutes, and healthcare organisations. The patient can choose to visit any healthcare facility on BlockTrack’s blockchain network without any concerns about duplication of records or re-registrations.
