IIT Madras launches the Centre for Responsible AI with Google's funding

Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) has established a Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI), an interdisciplinary research centre dedicated to ensuring the ethical and responsible development of AI-based solutions in the real world, with a ground-up focus on India. The centre aims to become a premier research centre at the national and international level for both fundamental and applied research in Responsible AI with an immediate impact on deploying AI systems in the Indian ecosystem.

The CeRAI conducted its first workshop on ‘Responsible AI for India’ on May 15, 2023, after being formally inaugurated on April 27, 2023, by Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology and Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Government of India. At the workshop, experts discussed the risks and challenges of using AI for solving societal problems, ensuring access to healthcare, making healthcare more affordable, making education more inclusive, and making agriculture more productive.

Google is the first platinum consortium member and has contributed a sum of US$ 1 Million for this Centre. Commenting earlier on the Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI) coming up at IIT Madras, Mr. Sanjay Gupta, Google’s Country Head and Vice President, India, said, “As India’s digital ecosystems increasingly adopt and leverage AI, we are committed to sharing the best practices we have been developing since 2018 when we began championing responsible AI."

The primary objective of CeRAI is to produce high-quality research outputs, such as publishing research articles in high-impact journals/conferences, white papers, and patents, among others. It will work towards creating technical resources such as curated datasets (universal as well as India-specific), software, toolkits, etc., with respect to the domain of Responsible AI. The Centre aims to foster various partnerships and collaborations with government organizations, academic institutions, and industries, and is actively engaged with NASSCOM’s Responsible AI initiative, Vidhi Legal, CMC Vellore, SICCI, TIE, and RIS.

Prof. V. Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras, highlighted the need for such centres, stating, “We have now reached a stage where we have to assign responsibility to AI tools and interpret the reasons for the output the AI gives. Aspects of human augmentation, biased data sets, risk of leakage of collected data, and the introduction of new policies besides substantial research must be addressed. There is a growing need for trust to be built around AI, and it is crucial to bring about the notion of privacy. AI will not take away jobs as long as domain interpretation exists.”

Speaking about the work that would be taken up in this centre, Prof. Balaraman Ravindran, Head, Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI), IIT Madras, said, “It is important for the AI model and its predictions to be explainable and interpretable when they are to be deployed in various critical sectors/domains such as Healthcare, Manufacturing, and Banking/Finance, among other areas. AI models need to provide performance guarantees appropriate to the applications they are deployed in. This covers data integrity, privacy, robustness of decision making, etc. We need research into developing assurance and risk models for AI systems in different sectors."

CeRAI will also provide sector-specific recommendations and guidelines for policymakers and all stakeholders with the necessary toolkits for ensuring ethical and responsible management and monitoring of AI systems that are being developed and deployed. The Centre also plans to create opportunities for conducting specialized sensitization/training programs for all stakeholders to appreciate the issues of Ethical and Responsible AI in a better manner so as to enable them to contribute meaningfully towards solving problems in respective domains.