Jan 4, 2020
What Nepal can do on AI???
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an emerging field in every sector of development, billions of dollar of investment is poured on developing the AI based system.
The traditional systems (lets say 1.0) is going to upgraded to AI based system (2.0) very soon, so for this target there are large number of companies and startup growing in this domain. Some of different AI sub-fields are Natural Language Processing,Robotics, Machine Vision, Evolutionary Computations and Machine Learning (ML). Among these, Machine Learning is the rapidly growing approach for solving real world problem. This article mainly cover up the Machine Learning based approaches.
What Nepal can do on AI
Research and Development on AI is still ongoing all over the world, so this is the right time to invest own effort and resources on AI. Yes, there are some good companies and startup’s are emerging here, Nepal need more companies and ideas on AI.
AI based Research and Development is geography independent, there are good number of application areas including agriculture, healthcare, tourism, education, data analysis etc, where Nepalese companies easily develop/port AI based system and market their technologies globally. Number of problems on different sectors or fields now can be solved with AI.
Note: this is just a top level article on AI/ML, it just cover implementation level of AI/ML instead of mathematical and statistical model.
Why Nepal can do on AI
- Every countries and organizations are working on AI, many application areas has not explored yet so it is right time.
- Nepal also have emerging tech talents, 6000+ Engineering and IT students graduates every year (estimated), by providing training for skill enhancement those tech talents can rapidly join the AI based development.
- Ecosystem for AI research and development is becoming big in Nepal, so it might be the plus point.
- Universities in Nepal is teaching AI since many years, but till few years back it was like as generic subjects with very few lab sessions. Now Universities and Engineering/Tech Colleges must have to focus on providing lab session on it.
What Resources needed to explore on AI?
While there are many ways now AI/ML based systems can be explored with low resources. While starting with training neural network with the dataset[combination of images and annotations/labels] Google is providing Google Colab(goto colab.research.google.com and get started) , AWS Instances (via Nepal distributor- Genese) and other cloud based platforms provide easy access to start and explore with machine learning. In personal level many Laptop’s come up with NVIDIA GPU, so those GPU can also be used along with the cloud based platforms.
Even organizations and colleges can start with medium cost GPU’s for training and implementation. NVIDIA’s GPU might be easy solution, many training of neural networks can be done on NVIDIA 2070–2080 GPU which cost some 2 Lakhs in Nepal. Colleges can easily afford more higher configuration GPU as Titan Series which can reduce the neural network training time drastically for specific dataset (public or custom).
What AI enthusiast must do?
You might start exploring with the cloud or own platform for Machine Learning, start learning the Neural Network architectures, methodologies for optimizing the architectures (hyperparameters) and implementing Machine Learning algorithm on Python, C/C++ or other languages while python is most used language even in ML.
Those who want to dig more then they can start through the mathematical model of AI algorithms.
What is on AI is happening in Nepal?
Yes, there are many companies who are working on AI, according to this article, Fusemachines, NAAMII, AI for Development, Paila technologies are some of popular names in Nepal. Fusemachines is also focus on AI awareness and education with its mission statement, “democratizing AI education”.
In 2018/2019 NAAMII has organized Workshop sessions on AI, they have invited some top research scholar on AI from reputed universities form US and Europe. In 2019 there was an AI Expo organized which was a exhibition for the companies and startup’s who are working on AI.
What Digitronix Nepal and LogicTronix are doing on AI with FPGA?
We have a collaboration initiative with to work/collab with Global and Nepalese Companies to excel on AI based Research and product/service development. We are now collaborating few international (global) companies and few local companies.
Our main expertise is on blending the AI with FPGAs [Field Programmable Gate Array, an reconfigurable/programmable chip technology]. We are [have] currently developing[developed] some high performance system for Automotive, Security and Computer Vision application with the AI implementations.
Conclusion!
So, many local problems can be solved using AI including problems in Agriculture, Education, healthcare, tourism, security etc. So more startup companies can developed innovative solution based on AI. They can prove the business model locally and they can go global.
There is plenty of opportunities and chance to be global company based on AI/ML. And there are number of international Venture Capital Funds and Global Accelerator which might help AI/ML based startup’s to go global. Some of such accelerator is Ycombinator, Berkley Skydeck [Global Hub], 500 Startup’s and more in this list: Crunchbase list of 100 accelerator, Best startup accelerator-growth mentor etc.
Finally, yes as you think there are many things this article is not covering, for that part i left to you, please make a research and write own article on “What Nepal can do on AI?” series!
Thank you for reading this article!
Comments and feedback are welcomed!
Reaching me: krishna@logictronix.com or LinkedIn, Facebook.
