“ARTPARK aims to develop world-class critical technologies for robotics and autonomous systems, reduce India’s import footprint in them and catalyse AI for India’s big challenges,” said Raghuram Dharmaraju, chief executive of ARTPARK. At its core, ARTPARK, a non-profit organisation, is a nexus for innovation, uniting startups, industry leaders, researchers, government bodies and non-profits. It also aims to skill the next generation of professionals in advanced manufacturing for robotics and autonomous technologies by 2025.
Bolstered by a seed funding of Rs 230 crore from the Centre’s department of science and technology and the Karnataka government, ARTPARK is implementing innovation initiatives in industrial automation, mobility, agriculture and healthcare. Functional benefits The park is structured around three core programmes: Innovations/startups, platforms and skilling. Notable among its physical platforms is the ARTgarage, a state-of-the-art manufacturing and testing facility. Spread across 75,000 square feet in HMT colony, ARTgarage serves as a hub for developing autonomous intelligent systems for industrial, social and defence purposes.
“This ecosystem supports startups, MSMEs and large organisations,” said Anurag Srivastava, COO, ARTPARK. Another digital platform is One Health & Climate, which has made an impact with its dengue dashboard. “The live dengue dashboard is a monitoring and analytics platform, which is embedded in the public health infrastructure of Karnataka and piloted in Pune region. It has so far impacted the lives of more than 80 million people,” said Bhaskar Rajakumar, programme director, health initiatives, ARTPARK. The Health Data & AI platform supports MIDAS, a collaboration between the Indian Council of Medical Research and IISc, aiming to create diverse datasets for AI-based healthcare tools.
“The aim,” said Rohit Satish, director, health data initiatives, ARTPARK, “is to enable the development and validation of AI-based screening and diagnostic tools to assist healthcare professionals.”
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Breaking language barriers ARTPARK and IISc, along with their partners, are creating language data and AI initiatives, striving to make digital India more inclusive. “Language is a barrier that billions must transcend to get access to the power and benefits of the internet,” said Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, assistant professor, department of electrical engineering at IISc, who leads the language data and AI initiative at ARTPARK, which includes Synthesising Speech in Indian languages (SYSPIN), RESPIN and Vaani.
SYSPIN is an initiative to create a text-to-speech (TTS) synthesiser in nine languages: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Bhojpuri, Kannada, Magadhi, Chhattisgarhi and Maithili. Speech recognition in agriculture and finance for the poor is an initiative called RESPIN.
“We are building pan-India mechanisms through which we are bringing together speech and text data representing this diversity,” said Ghosh about project Vaani, which is curating datasets of 1,50,000 hours of natural speech and text from around one million people across all 773 districts of India which will be open-sourced. ARTPARK’s startup programmes facilitate the transition from lab ideas to market solutions, addressing everyday challenges in AI and robotics.
The ARTPARK Innovation Challenge 2024 offers up to Rs 2 crore annually per team, supporting startups in AI, robotics, and autonomous systems solving big industry or societal problems.