With the vision to further expand the idea of ‘Artificial Intelligence, AI for All’ articulated in the National AI Strategy, NITI Aayog organises hackathons to source sustainable, innovative and technologically-enabled solutions to address various challenges in the development space.

Taking the initiative forward, NITI Aayog is now partnering with Perlin – a Singapore-based AI start up - to launch the ‘AI 4 All Global Hackathon’, and is inviting developers, students, start-ups and companies to develop AI applications to make significant positive social and economic impact for India.

The challenge question seeks to develop solutions in Distributed Computing and Privacy Preserving techniques, such as multi-party computation, in AI. The objective of this hackathon is to promote awareness and subsequently develop solutions that deliver the twin benefit of efficient computing to address the infrastructure challenges, while also not compromising on privacy of data for training AI algorithms.

NITI Aayog organized its first hackathon, ‘MoveHack’ in August, on the sidelines of the Global Mobility Summit 2018, with the aim of garnering cutting-edge mobility applications. Over 2,000 submissions were received out of which the Top 10 teams were awarded at the summit.

“The AI for All Hackathon underscores the commitment of NITI Aayog to supporting meaningful social, economic and technological advancements directed at making people’s lives better,” said Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Aayog, “we believe India is ideally positioned as a thought-leader and regional economic power to help bring the benefits of innovation in AI and distributed computing to communities in developing countries around the world.”

The ‘AI 4 All Global Hackathon’ was announced at the AI conference organized by NITI Aayog, in partnership with the ORF, held in Mumbai in November 2018.

The hackathon will be run two stages with Stage One ending 15 January 2019 and Stage Two, which will only include shortlisted participants from the previous stage, will conclude on 15 March 2019.

The jury shall comprise of the leaders from the technology and policy ecosystem, namely, Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog; Michael Witbrock, Head at AI Foundations Lab IBM;  Anandamoy Roychowdhary, Director of Technology at Sequoia Capital; Prahbakar Reddy, Partner at Accel Partners; Professor AnupMalani, Co-founder & Faculty Director of International Innovation Corps; Ery Punta Hendraswara, Innovation Management at Telkom; and Dorjee Sun, CEO of Perlin.

The first stage will invite ideas for use cases of multi-party computation in areas such as Healthcare, Education, Agriculture, Urbanization, Financial Inclusion. The second stage will call for these ideas to be matured and developed, with a focus on privacy preserving AI and distributed computing.

Winners will share in a prize pool worth $50,000 in both cash and non-cash rewards. Participants will also get mentorship and support from the hackathon co-sponsors, including the opportunity to scale and implement their AI applications.