NITI Aayog, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Intel have come together to establish a new experience studio at the NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies Cloud Innovation Center (CIC). Located in NITI Aayog's New Delhi premises, the studio will be a hub for collaboration and experimentation to enable problem-solving and innovation between government stakeholders, startups, enterprises, and industry domain experts, said a statement.
The studio will help showcase the potential of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), Internet of Things (IoT), augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/ VR), blockchain, and robotics to accelerate their application in public sector use cases. The studio will encourage open innovation and serve as a hub for government, healthcare, education, and nonprofit startups from India to showcase their solutions. It will also provide startups with an option to access the necessary support to enhance and scale their solutions, said AWS in a statement.
NITI Aayog will also leverage the studio to demonstrate the application of geospatial, AR/VR, drone, and IoT solutions in verticals such as healthcare, agriculture, and smart infrastructure.
Companies in respective fields of technology like MapMyIndia in geospatial solutions, Raphe mPhibr in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and the Centre for Advanced Research in Imaging, Neuroscience and Genomics (CARING), which delivers AI in healthcare and global firms like Dassault Systemes, and startups like Vizara Technologies and Agatsa Software are demonstrating their solutions at the studio.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that effective collaboration and experimentation matter significantly when developing innovative solutions to address problems of scale in the country. As the NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies CIC identifies societal challenges to address, it is important to embrace a culture of open innovation and work backward from problem statements. The new experience studio with AWS and Intel will further support our mission to identify and deploy leading-edge technologies to drive continuous innovation in delivering citizen services,” said Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog.
The NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies CIC was established in October 2020 as part of the AWS Cloud Innovation Centers Global Program. Focusing on tackling the challenges facing India, the CIC recently developed COvAID during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Developed in five days, COvAID provided a platform for consolidating the end-to-end flow of aid received to support COVID-19 affected people, distributing the aid in a transparent manner, and accelerating the speed at which the aid reaches beneficiaries.
In another example, working with the Digi Yatra Foundation, the CIC also anchored the Digital Yatra Central Ecosystem (DYCE) Challenge, inviting startups to develop a real-time facial biometric validation solution to provide a frictionless, hassle-free, contact-less, and safe experience to passengers during air travel.
AWS Public Sector CICs are also present across Australia, Bahrain, Canada, France, Germany, South Korea, and the United States. Earlier this year, AWS also collaborated with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in India to establish a Quantum Computing Applications Lab in the country, focused on accelerating quantum computing-led research and development, and enabling new scientific discoveries aligned to the government's science and technology priorities.
