India's new industrial policy which will be rolled out in the coming months will have a deep focus on technology and innovation to boost manufacturing and economic growth. Sources in Niti Aayog, the government's policy thinktank, told FactorDaily that while Make In India was focussed largely on programs and schemes, the industrial policy will look at the long-term development of manufacturing and create employment. The industrial policy, which the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion and Niti Aayog is working on will be built in a way that Indian manufacturing is future ready, and that cannot be done without technology. "The idea is to prepare for future industries. For example, the way fintech, artificial intelligence and internet of things are converging (towards) manufacturing," said one source.

Two out of three Indians count on agriculture as their primary livelihood yet the sector contributes just one-sixth of the country's national income. For long, policy mandarins and economists have bemoaned this skew and the urgent need to boost farm productivity but little has moved the needle in Indian farming in recent decades except in pockets. Like in every other sector, artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, combined with on the ground automated sensing using internet of things devices, is being deployed in agriculture, too. The start-ups are paving the way for tech to to help the Indian farmer to tackle one the biggest challenges before farming: uncertainty. "Uncertainty is the poison in the blood of Indian farming. Farming is difficult and stressful, driving farmers out of farming and sometimes even to suicide. Technology companies in the agri-tech space are helping to make farming into a more stable and desirable industry," says Kahn, a Harvard MBA with over a decade in the Indian agriculture space Today a handful of startups working on AI-backed solutions are paving the way ahead for bringing in the tech to help the Indian farmer to tackle one of the biggest challenges: uncertainty.

"The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe," Michio Kaku, Physicist and Futurist The human brain, which not just stores but also computes, is by far the most powerful and complex computers in the world that occupies just 1.3 litres of space and consumes about 20 watts of power. In comparison, the finest supercomputers in the world require gigawatts of power, massive real estate, infrastructure, and dedicated cooling systems while attempting to perform brain-like tasks. Understanding how the human brain functions and replicating it has been a lifelong quest for the scientific and research community. Enter neuromorphic computing, a concept developed by American scientist and researcher Carver Andress Mead in the late 1980s – which tries to emulate certain functions of the human brain in silicon.

There is a lot of debate on whether Industry 4.0 with a strong underpinning of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning is going to result in large-scale unemployment. This seems a bit odd because neither technology nor automation is a 21st-century phenomenon! They are as old as humanity itself, and if this appears an exaggeration, then they are at least as old as the industrial revolution at least. The battle between man and machines goes back centuries. At one point of time, the worry was what would happen if spinning machines replaced weavers and if steam engines took the place of horse carriages.

When you post something on LinkedIn, chances are that an algorithm made by Rushi Bhatt's team in Bengaluru has checked if it's kosher to be on the professional network. It sounds easy but consider the complexity: LinkedIn has over 560 million members, 20 million companies, millions of job postings and it works in 24 different languages. If all its millions of users seamlessly post on the platform every day, it is because LinkedIn's algorithms, with a lot of help from humans, green-light them before the user can blink an eye. "We have to walk this fine line between freedom of expression and not letting poor content live on the site. That makes it really complicated for everybody, including humans," says Bhatt, an alum of Amazon and Yahoo with a Ph.D. in cognitive and neural systems from Boston University and degrees from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and what is today NIT, Surat. At its worst, a poor newsfeed can drive away users. On the other hand, a good one can keep you hooked on a platform for hours. At LinkedIn, it is the job of the "Feed AI" team to maintain fidelity. Bhatt's job is to literally keep the NSFW stuff away. It's a problem almost all major platforms with user-generated content – be it Youtube or Twitter – struggle with.

If you're a Bengaluru resident, it's quite likely that you might have seen mfine's billboards, which are plastered around town, pitching their solution for an on-demand healthcare platform, where you can get a doctor consultation in 60 seconds. The year-old startup, founded by ex-Myntra co-founder Ashutosh Lawania and other members of Myntra's leadership team is not only mobile first, it's also an AI first startup. Its homepage touts its AI healthcare platform, claiming that the system is learning medical standards, protocols, diagnosis and treatment methods. "Software is going to eat the world, but AI is going to eat software." AI and machine learning have made significant incursions into agriculture, transport, education, and healthcare this decade, and some of these ripples can be felt in India too.

It was his unique teaching style that got me and a bunch of my friends hooked to this topic and field – his enthusiasm towards the material, the intuitive examples that he gives…,

It's 9 am on a February morning and the mercury is just inching past 20 degrees Celsius in Bengaluru. The workday is already two hours old in the metropolis's densely laid-out eastern suburb of Marathahalli. A student batch of both unemployed and working software professionals at Robotek Minds, a tech training institute, has just finished its data science class. Data science is the new buzzword in the tech industry and the code jocks in the Marathahalli class have a singular focus: a job or a leg-up at one of the shiny information technology campuses dotting the city and housing the world's leading tech corporations. Which, they hope, will be a passport to a comfortable salary that will grow in long strides in the years ahead as the use of data in the world economy explodes.

The demand for talent that can work on artificial intelligence and its applications is set to spike as it becomes pervasive in industries ranging from automotive to retail. Tech giants are fighting over AI talent, often paying anywhere between $300,000- $500,000 for their skills. It's still early days but in Bengaluru, which led the charge during the outsourcing boom, some early moves are being made to ready talent for the fourth industrial revolution-- one where machines and software meld into one. Can India supply that talent? Last week we wrote about how the country is moving to address the AI talent supply gap.

Early in November, a Japanese delegation visited the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati campus. The team of five were looking for students with artificial intelligence and deep learning skills from India's premier technology schools for companies in Japan. They had visited IIT-Bombay before flying to the east. In an hour-long meeting, the visitors listed their requirements before K Mohanty, head of career development at IIT-Guwahati and the convenor of the All IITs Placement Committee. "They are willing to come to the placements only if we can provide them with people trained with AI skills. On confirmation, they will hire 15-20 people next year from Guwahati and an equal number from IIT-Bombay," he told FactorDaily.