The Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Technologies Park (ARTPARK) set up in Bengaluru will promote technology innovations in niche areas by executing ambitious projects in various sectors by focusing on problems unique to India, the Department of Science and Technology said on Monday.
ARTPARK is a unique not-for-profit foundation established by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru with support from AI Foundry in a public-private model.
With seed funding of Rs 170 crore (USD 22 million) from the Department of Science and Technology (DST) under the National Mission on Inter-disciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS), it will bring about collaborative consortium of partners from industry, academia and government bodies.
This will lead to cutting-edge innovations in terms of new technologies, standards, products, services and intellectual properties, the DST said.
"Some of these facilities will be key enablers for whole new sets of technologies, products and services,” it said.
It will develop DataSetu which 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, the DST said.
One such service will be BhashaSetu which 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, it added.
The NM-ICPS with its 25 hubs has a unique architecture that envisages a strong collaboration and co-ownership among the triple helix of industry, academia and government with full flexibility.
Generous additional support of the Karnataka government to the ARTPARK hub brings extraordinary value in increasing its effectiveness, reach and use, the DST added.
"It 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," Professor Ashutosh Sharma, DST secretary, said at the recent launch of ARTPARK.
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 laboratories into the outside world. ARTPARK would go a long way in establishing a template for addressing this need," IISc director Govindan Rangarajan noted.
ARTPARK will also develop AI & Robotics facilities to support technology innovations.