Sixth Industrial Revolution at NXP TECH Summit

NXP India, a world leader in secure connectivity solutions for embedded applications organised their fifth NXP Tech Summit, where a panel discussion on ‘AI for a smart and connected world’ was held. NXP Industry Tech Summit is a knowledge sharing platform that includes visionary keynote and panel discussion on a chosen theme of wider technical interest.

The summit saw participation from eminent tech industry leaders who debated the role of Artificial

Intelligence (AI) in the smart and connected world. Interesting anecdotes and use cases of AI were

discussed. Broadly, the panel discussion revolved around the future of AI, challenges related to it,

security measures that are imperative and till what extend AI should be implemented. The Indian

tech leaders had different perspective on the definition of AI and where all it should or should not be

implemented but collectively agreed that India is rightly positioned to drive the sixth industrial

revolution across the world.

The discussion was moderated by Sanjay Gupta, Vice President and India Country Manager, NXP.

The keynote panelists included Kanwal Rai, Entrepreneur, Author, Product Leader and Business &

technology Innovation Advisor, Jaswinder Ahuja, Corporate Vice President and India Managing

Director, Cadence Design Systems, Dr. Roshy John, Scientist and Inventor of India's First Driverless Car, Dr. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Associate Professor, Computer Science, IIIT Delhi.

Speaking on the role and future of AI, Sanjay Gupta said, ‘With the advent of AI, there are plenty of

opportunities for start-ups to emerge in this country. On the ethical front, there will be development

of systems which are trained to think ethically, so that they are viable part of the society and

become friends of humans. The country is at the right cusp of progression at the right time, so we

should innovate to make India a better and smarter country with culture of innovative thinking.”

Further, the discussions tried to gauge huge contours of Artificial Intelligence and its impact on a

global scale. It mostly revolved around the idea of Algorithmic bias and what steps can be taken to

prevent it. The idea of security of data was also highly debated within the panelists and the role of

legislation in ensuring the same. Almost every panelist agreed on the notion that Artificial

intelligence will create a new section of jobs and not destroy jobs, however learnability will play an

important factor in making this shift happen. Role of AI in India’s defence and financial technology

systems were also discussed along with many other possibilities.

Here is a glimpse of what the leaders had to say during the summit today:

Kanwal Rai, Entrepreneur, Author, Product Leader and Business & technology Innovation Advisor,

said “I would prefer to call AI as “aided intelligence” instead of “Artificial intelligence” to put this

matter of thought, in a different perspective. AI could be brought to aid in cognitive tasks where

human beings are less predictable, less consistent and less efficient compared to the artificial agents,

algorithms and machines”.

Jaswinder Ahuja, Corporate Vice President and India Managing Director, Cadence Design Systems,

said “Today we have image recognition technology which recognizes objects and relationship

between objects to an extent. For the future, there is a lot of research which is being done to

recognize emotions and predict behaviour, which would have many real-world applications.”

Dr. Roshy John, Scientist and Inventor of India's First Driverless Car, said “There is a lot of

opportunities for business to be developed by encoding emotions into AI. Recently we saw a good

example with a popular app which could recognize your face and create an image of your old self

very realistically.”

Dr. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Associate Professor, Computer Science, IIIT Delhi, said “Consumers

need to become more aware about the technologies they are using and what all do they encompass.

Currently people don’t even read Users License Agreement before downloading any application on

their devices. Given the proliferation of ML solutions, ethics of building these solutions, Fairness /

Accountability / Transparency of Algorithms being built as part of these solutions are becoming an

important aspect of study in this domain”.