Latest news with #ManishGupta
The Hindu
2 days ago
- Business
- The Hindu
Google launches AI innovations to make agricultural practices more data-driven and efficient
Google on Thursday unveiled new open-source AI innovations and initiatives aimed at strengthening India's agriculture sector and making AI models more sensitive to the country's linguistic and cultural diversity. The company launched the Agricultural Monitoring and Event Detection (AMED) API that provides information on crops and field activity across India, empowering the ecosystem to build targeted solutions that support agricultural productivity and resilience. Researchers at Google DeepMind have also collaborated with IIT-Kharagpur to build localized datasets on India's rich cultural tapestry as part of Google's Amplify Initiative, aiming to help equip global Large Language Models with better linguistic and cultural context. Speaking at a roundtable in Ananta, Google's office in Bengaluru, Dr. Manish Gupta, Senior Director for India and APAC at Google DeepMind said, 'At Google, along with charting new frontiers in foundational AI, which forms the backbone of many of our launches in the Gemini era, we have continued advancing fundamental research that addresses some of the most pressing challenges facing humanity.'' According to Alok Talekar, Lead, Agriculture and Sustainability Research Lead, Google DeepMind, with AI research and especially with AMED building on the foundation of ALU (Agricultural Landscape Understanding) , Google was working on accelerating crucial shifts, transforming broad insights to granular, real-time data, so that increasingly impactful solutions not only translate into benefit for India's farmers, but also bolster the nation against rising climate risks. Madhurima Maji, Lead Program Manager, Amplify Initiative for India at Google said, AI models could be even more helpful with a deeper understanding of the vastness and complexity of the lived human experience. ``Through the Amplify Initiative, we are meticulously building the rich, hyperlocal context and cultural understanding that transforms raw information into profound knowledge. So that any and every Large Language Model can be fundamentally helpful and genuinely relevant to diverse realities,'' he added. Dr. Mainack Mandal, Assistant Professor, IIT Kharagpur stated: 'We've been inspired by the results this initiative has achieved in Sub-Saharan Africa, and look forward to ensuring that the groundwork we lay here translates into AI which is more responsive to India's incredible plurality.' According to Google, Amplify Initiative was piloted in Sub-Saharan Africa and has created an annotated dataset of over 8000 queries in seven African languages authored collaboratively with 155 experts, addressing a range of topics from chronic disease to misinformation. In India, the local partner for the Amplify Initiative would begin building datasets related to specific issues, including in healthcare and safety, in multiple Indic languages, it added.
India Gazette
2 days ago
- Business
- India Gazette
Google unveils open-source AI innovations to strengthen Indian agriculture, reflect culture
Bengaluru (Karnataka) [India], July 10 (ANI): Google has unveiled a new open-source AI innovations and initiatives, aimed at strengthening India's agriculture sector and making AI models more sensitive to the country's linguistic and cultural diversity. As per a statement on Thursday, the company launched the Agricultural Monitoring and Event Detection (AMED) API that it said provides information on crops and field activity across India, empowering the ecosystem to build targeted solutions that support agricultural productivity and resilience. Researchers at Google DeepMind have also collaborated with IIT-Kharagpur to build localised datasets on India's rich cultural tapestry as part of Google's Amplify Initiative, aiming to help equip global Large Language Models with better linguistic and cultural context. Speaking at a roundtable in Ananta, Google's newest office, Manish Gupta, Senior Director for India and APAC at Google DeepMind said: 'At Google, along with charting new frontiers in foundational AI, which forms the backbone of many of our launches in the Gemini era, we have continued advancing fundamental research that addresses some of the most pressing challenges facing humanity.' 'We've been inspired by the solutions India's innovators have unlocked with these capabilities, demonstrating AI to be a powerful catalyst for multiplier impact and unprecedented effectiveness. We remain committed to growing this momentum and enabling the benefits of helpful and inclusive AI to reach everyone across India,' added Gupta. Aimed at making agricultural practices more data-driven and efficient, and solutions for India's agri sector more effective, AMED API, developed by Google Deepmind and Google Partnerships Innovation team, builds upon Google's ALU API, and now leverages crop labels, raw satellite imagery and machine learning to assist crop monitoring and detection of agricultural events on fields across the country. The API details the type of crop on individual fields across India, as well as each field's size and corresponding sowing and harvesting dates. The API even provides historical information about the agricultural activity in each field for the last three years. These insights can help the ecosystem build the next generation of AI-enabled solutions that significantly strengthen agricultural management on farms, contributing to addressing the specific needs of each crop, including the right soil and water conditions, growing habits, and climatic need, as well as predicting harvest volume. Alok Talekar, Lead, Agriculture and Sustainability Research Lead, Google DeepMind, said: 'Our commitment to the sustainable growth of India's agricultural sector deepens with every innovation. With AI research - and especially with AMED building on the foundation of ALU - we're working on accelerating crucial shifts, transforming broad insights to granular, real-time data, so that increasingly impactful solutions not only translate into benefit for India's farmers, but also bolster the nation against rising climate risks.' (ANI)
Mint
2 days ago
- Business
- Mint
Google unveils open-source AI innovations to strengthen Indian agriculture, reflect culture
Bengaluru (Karnataka) [India], July 10 (ANI): Google has unveiled a new open-source AI innovations and initiatives, aimed at strengthening India's agriculture sector and making AI models more sensitive to the country's linguistic and cultural diversity. As per a statement on Thursday, the company launched the Agricultural Monitoring and Event Detection (AMED) API that it said provides information on crops and field activity across India, empowering the ecosystem to build targeted solutions that support agricultural productivity and resilience. You may be interested in Researchers at Google DeepMind have also collaborated with IIT-Kharagpur to build localised datasets on India's rich cultural tapestry as part of Google's Amplify Initiative, aiming to help equip global Large Language Models with better linguistic and cultural context. Speaking at a roundtable in Ananta, Google's newest office, Manish Gupta, Senior Director for India and APAC at Google DeepMind said: "At Google, along with charting new frontiers in foundational AI, which forms the backbone of many of our launches in the Gemini era, we have continued advancing fundamental research that addresses some of the most pressing challenges facing humanity." "We've been inspired by the solutions India's innovators have unlocked with these capabilities, demonstrating AI to be a powerful catalyst for multiplier impact and unprecedented effectiveness. We remain committed to growing this momentum and enabling the benefits of helpful and inclusive AI to reach everyone across India," added Gupta. Aimed at making agricultural practices more data-driven and efficient, and solutions for India's agri sector more effective, AMED API, developed by Google Deepmind and Google Partnerships Innovation team, builds upon Google's ALU API, and now leverages crop labels, raw satellite imagery and machine learning to assist crop monitoring and detection of agricultural events on fields across the country. The API details the type of crop on individual fields across India, as well as each field's size and corresponding sowing and harvesting dates. The API even provides historical information about the agricultural activity in each field for the last three years. These insights can help the ecosystem build the next generation of AI-enabled solutions that significantly strengthen agricultural management on farms, contributing to addressing the specific needs of each crop, including the right soil and water conditions, growing habits, and climatic need, as well as predicting harvest volume. Alok Talekar, Lead, Agriculture and Sustainability Research Lead, Google DeepMind, said: "Our commitment to the sustainable growth of India's agricultural sector deepens with every innovation. With AI research - and especially with AMED building on the foundation of ALU - we're working on accelerating crucial shifts, transforming broad insights to granular, real-time data, so that increasingly impactful solutions not only translate into benefit for India's farmers, but also bolster the nation against rising climate risks." (ANI)
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Business Standard
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Standard
Google focuses on India's farms and languages in new AI initiatives
Google launched open-source AI initiatives on Thursday targeting India's agriculture sector and cultural representation in artificial intelligence models. The tech giant introduced its Agricultural Monitoring and Event Detection (AMED) API, which tracks crop and field data across India to help developers create farming productivity tools. Researchers at Google DeepMind also partnered with IIT-Kharagpur through the company's Amplify Initiative to build datasets capturing India's linguistic and cultural diversity for integration into large language models. These developments build on Google's sustained investments and commitment to AI research that drives real-world impact across critical areas while also supporting India's AI-focused ambitions. "We've been inspired by the solutions India's innovators have unlocked with these capabilities, demonstrating AI to be a powerful catalyst for multiplier impact and unprecedented effectiveness,' said Dr. Manish Gupta, senior director for India and APAC at Google DeepMind, during a roundtable in Bengaluru. Google DeepMind and the Partnerships Innovation team have developed the AMED API to improve agricultural monitoring across India. Building on the company's Agricultural Landscape Understanding (ALU) API, the new tool uses machine learning, crop labels, and satellite imagery to identify crop types, field sizes, and sowing and harvesting dates. It also offers three years of historical data to track agricultural activity at the field level. These insights aim to help develop AI-driven solutions that improve farm management by addressing crop-specific needs such as soil, water, growth patterns, and climate, while also forecasting harvest volumes. Alok Talekar, Lead of Agriculture and Sustainability Research at Google DeepMind, said the firm is working on accelerating crucial shifts, transforming broad insights into granular, real-time data. 'So that increasingly impactful solutions not only translate into benefits for India's farmers but also bolster the nation against rising climate risks,' said Talekar. TerraStack, a startup incubated at IIT-Bombay, has used the ALU API to build a rural land intelligence system. The aim is to support rural lending, land record modernization, and determine the vulnerability of farms to climate risk. It is exploring the AMED API for a rural lending use case. 'These APIs are helping standardize and transform previously unorganised and unusable data into solutions for one of India's most critical sectors,' said Aaryan Dangi, co-founder and CEO of TerraStack. Linguistic Diversity Google's Amplify Initiative seeks to improve large language models by incorporating localized data—including regional languages, dialects, and cultural nuances—missing from current AI training. Partnering with IIT-Kharagpur, the project will develop high-quality, hyperlocal datasets capturing India's linguistic diversity. The open-source datasets aim to help developers create AI tools that better serve Indian language users. Data collection follows a community-driven, expert-vetted process to ensure responsible handling and reduce bias. After a pilot in Sub-Saharan Africa producing 8,000 annotated queries across seven languages, the India phase will focus on healthcare and safety topics in multiple Indic languages. 'We are meticulously building the rich, hyperlocal context and cultural understanding that transforms raw information into profound knowledge,' said Madhurima Maji, lead program manager for the Amplify Initiative for India at Google. Dr. Mainack Mandal, Assistant Professor at IIT Kharagpur, said the collaboration opens a new chapter in global AI development. The Amplify Initiative builds on Google's broader push to improve Indian language and cultural representation in AI, alongside its flagship Project Vaani. Developed with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, Project Vaani has released its second-phase Indic speech data through Bhashini and Hugging Face. So far, the initiative has contributed nearly 21,500 hours of speech audio and 835 hours of transcribed data across 86 languages, collected from over 112,000 speakers in 120 districts. The open-source data aims to support AI tools tailored to India's linguistic diversity. 'This support fuels our continued investments in language and culture research, and drives us to make our foundational models, on which India is building its AI ambition, more effective and efficient in processing Indian languages,' said Dr. Partha Talukdar, language research lead at Google DeepMind. Google said its AI models are being used across sectors in India, from improving maternal health programs and streamlining patient care to supporting agri-tech solutions and advancing the country's sovereign AI efforts. The AlphaFold Protein Structure Database—developed by Google DeepMind and now used by over 150,000 researchers in India—is aiding work on complex diseases such as cancer and autoimmune disorders. With a focus on collaboration and ecosystem-driven innovation, Google said it aims to drive broad, real-world impact through AI in India.
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India.com
2 days ago
- Business
- India.com
Google Launches New AI Innovations To Strengthen Indian Agricultural Sector
Bengaluru: Google on Thursday launched a new agricultural monitoring and event detection (AMED) application programming interface (API) in India. The company also announced a collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur to build localised datasets on India's rich cultural tapestry. It will help in equipping global Large Language Models with better linguistic and cultural context at the local level. The new mechanism will provide information on crops and field activity across India that will eventually empower the ecosystem to build targeted solutions that support agricultural productivity and resilience, the global tech giant said in a statement. The API details the type of crop on individual fields across India, as well as each field's size and corresponding sowing and harvesting dates. It will also provide historical information of last three years about the agricultural activity in each field. 'With AI research -- and especially with AMED building on the foundation of ALU -- we're working on accelerating crucial shifts, transforming broad insights to granular, real-time data, so that increasingly impactful solutions not only translate into benefit for India's farmers, but also bolster the nation against rising climate risks," said Alok Talekar, agriculture and sustainability research lead, Google DeepMind. 'At Google, along with charting new frontiers in foundational AI, which forms the backbone of many of our launches in the Gemini era, we have continued advancing fundamental research that addresses some of the most pressing challenges facing humanity," said Manish Gupta, Senior Director for India and APAC at Google DeepMind. By adding more localised data — such as various languages, dialects, and cultural quirks that aren't currently included in AI training — Google's Amplify Initiative seeks to fill in knowledge gaps in Large Language models. 'We're thrilled to collaborate with Google on the Amplify Initiative and open a new chapter in global AI development," stated Dr Mainack Mandal, Assistant Professor, IIT Kharagpur.
