IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has inaugurated NIC’s Command & Control Centre (CCC) and Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence by NIC, at National Informatics Centre (NIC). Speaking on the occasion, Prasad said the new technologies have potential to transform societies and usher in an era of transparency and efficient governance. He said women who are more attracted towards new technologies, can further catalyse social change which these technologies are bound to bring. Institutions like NIC should not only serve government, but also guide private sector in applying artificial intelligence to improve consumer centric services, he pointed out.
NIC has been offering data centre and cloud services to the government. Currently, it has four national data centres and 30 mini data centres across the country, hosting over 10,000 e-Governance applications. Majority of critical applications of the government are hosted at these locations and the volume and nature of these critical online services have evolved and grown considerably.
A need was felt to set up a specialised facility with a nationwide view of ICT infrastructure for effective monitoring and management of the performance and availability of all these critical services. With this aim, NIC has set up the Command and Control Centre, making it first of its kind in the government which will increase the agility of NIC’s nationwide ICT infrastructure.
In addition to this infra monitoring setup, NIC is also in the process of having a centralised monitoring of critical websites hosted on cloud.
Additionally for large critical projects, NIC is proposing to provide users with a customised dashboard where they can monitor resources and availability of their applications. Applications like e-office, e-hospital, Beneficiary Identification System under Ayushman Bharat are already on-board on this dashboard.
CoE in AI by NIC has been established with the motto of ‘Inclusive AI’ for responsive governance, to work towards improving government service delivery to citizens. This CoE in AI will be a platform for innovative new solutions in AI space, a gateway to test and develop solutions for projects undertaken by NIC at central and state level. CoE in AI is designed to promote innovation in application of AI to take e-governance services to the next level.
It will also provide capacity building and institutionalising AI in ministries / departments / organizations. COE in AI@NIC is to facilitate technology support with supercomputing facilities for prototyping in the fields of image and video analytics, speech synthesis and recognition and Natural Language Processing. This newly established centre will focus on the areas of Machine Learning, NLP and AI in text, image recognition, speech recognition and synthesis, deep learning and chatbot / voicebots.
NIC has done a few Proofs of Concepts (PoCs) in image analytics as in Swachh Bharat Urban, numeric modeling as in power, text classification and summarisation etc which will find an echo in similar use cases in other ministries and departments.