Artificial Intelligence in New Town

A one day Knowledge Exchange workshop on AI will be held on 18 May 2018 at Biswa Bangla Convention Centre at New Town. Dr P P Chakraborty, Director IIT Kharagpur will deliver the keynote address. Hon'ble MIC (IT&E) will inaugurate. Topics covered will be AI in Business, AI in Governance, AI in Industry (Industry 4.0), Deep Learning and a panel discussion on Capacity Building. Speakers will come from - besides IIT Kgp - ISI, PwC, Wipro, IBM and others. Although the workshop day is two weeks away, all 400 seats are already full by online applications and , on popular request, a wait-listing mechanism is also introduced. ( see AI Registration )We will evaluate the situation next week to see if we should go for a larger hall in BBCC.

With PRM Fincon Team at The Terminus, New Town yesterday (28 April 2018)

To understand actual use case developments of AI in Bengal, I went to the workspace of PRM Fincon yesterday (http://www.prmfincon.com ). This is located at 4th floor of the building where Pride Hotel is located: the building is called The Terminus. Mr Prithwiraj Mukherjee, CEO (in full sleeved white shirt to the left of me in the photo above) and his team gave me a longish demonstration of what they do.

Basically, they use AI to analyse risk profile of companies and thus advise investors to invest wisely. In addition, they use AI together with IoT to predict possible failures in heavy industrial machines so that timely corrections can be taken and thus reduce idle time (upto 30%, they said, in respect of a use case in an Australian coal mine). They use recurrent neural networks with back propagation and LSTM (Long Short Term Memory).

I also found that they are working on video analytics and their laboratory level prototype is already able to use AI (based on Python code) to analyse CCTV feeds to flag if vehicles were crossing lanes and if a two-wheeler rider is wearing a helmet or not and  whether it is a soft cap or a proper hard helmet. I thought this would be a great case to improve the road safety in accordance with Hon'ble CM's "Safe Drive, Save Life" campaign and I asked Mr Mukherjee to see if this could be developed further and used in New Town's CCTVs in a pilot use case.

I also invited Mr Pritwiraj Mukherjee to talk very briefly about the coal drilling machine use case on the 18th Workshop.