Stanley Kubrick (1968) imagined the year of 2001 with mankind establishing civilization orbiting the Earth and
probing the outer space using a ‘Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer (HAL)’, which controls a space
station and interacts with its astronauts. While reality fell short of a HAL in 2001, computing technologies and
mathematical optimization led to massive progress of Artificial Intelligence (AI), enough to demand attention from
nation states to further its advancements towards organizing and enhancing economic and social welfare. India is
among several countries in the world that recently announced its national strategy for AI, #AIFORALL (2018)1
, and constituted a task force2 to identify relevant applications of AI in India including challenges faced or likely to be faced in the adoption of AI-based systems. By some measure, India is also seeing research in AI, with one study ranking India highly with respect to the number of ‘citable documents’, on AI, i.e. the number of research publications in peer-reviewed journals in the field of AI3.
