A
Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was inked between the Indian Institute of
Technology – Banaras Hindu University (IIT-BHU) and Amazon Internet
Services Private Limited (AISPL) to improve cloud-ready job skills by giving
students and faculty access to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Educate program,
and to help establish an Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)
Cloud Research Lab. The
Minister of Human Resources Development, Mr Prakash Javadekar was present when
the MoU was signed.
According
to an official
press released by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, the
Cloud Research Lab will give students the opportunity to use AWS cloud
technology to create and implement projects that focus mainly on AI and ML research
and development, for the country.
Under
the MoU agreement, the IIT-BHU will be provided with access to the resources in
AWS Educate program and with a curriculum designed for higher education
institutions to include in their courses; the partnership is likely to help increase
student’s cloud-related technical expertise.
Amazon
is providing free services in cloud computing, data-sets and a number of new
technologies, which will enable the candidates and the faculty to carry out
more thorough and focused research. Mr Prakash Javadekar said that the Prime
Minister Mr Narendra Modi has been encouraging new research and digital
development initiatives; he added that the Prime Minister believes that unless the
country is innovative, it will not attain sustainable prosperity.
The
Prime Minister has launched several digital programmes in India in order to
increase the use and development of new technologies throughout India; such as,
“Digital
India”, “Smart City”, “Make In India”,
and the setting up of Common
Service Centres (CSCs), which are access points to deliver
electronic services to people in remote areas.
With
the Higher Education
Financing Agency (HEFA) and finance from other resources, the Prime Minister’s Research
Fellowship project and programs like the IMPRINT scheme, Higher
Invention Plan (Uchchtar Aviskar Yojana), the quality of
research and development in India will improve.
The
Ministry said that the AWS Educate program is a global initiative that provides
a large range of learning content, resources, and AWS Promotional Credits for
students and educators to gain hands-on experience with AWS Cloud
services. Students and faculty will be able to have access to
instructor-led classes, on-demand training, self-paced labs, as well as ongoing
technical assistance and support.
The
project marks a new AI revolution in the country and is a big step in direction
of more technological innovation and research. The AWS program offers over 125
services for computing, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine
learning and Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile,
security, virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), media, and application
development, implementation, and management; and these features are available for
use by the IIT-BHU faculty, researchers and students to help develop new
projects and come up with solutions for the country.
The
press release noted that AI will
be able to add around US $1 trillion to India’s economy, by 2035.
India has a significant stake in the AI revolution being the fastest growing
economy and having the second largest population in the world. The use of AI
needs to be promoted in the areas of health, education, environment,
infrastructure, cybersecurity and other sectors.
Mr
Prakash Javadekar said that this collaboration is economical, efficient and is
likely to have far-reaching effects as research by the students has the
potential to also benefit all sections of the society including farmers and
entrepreneurs in villages, and not just in urban and technologically advanced
areas.
