Bengaluru: At the 25th annual convocation of the International Institute of Information Technology-Bangalore (IIIT-B) on Sunday, top graduates looked at the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in healthcare and education, and effective chip designing to make smaller devices faster.The ceremony saw 372 students graduate from the institute.Speaking to TOI, Monjoynarayan Choudhury, one of the gold medallists in Integrated Master of Technology (IMTech), said, "I plan to pursue research in AI/ML eventually. I'm placed at the moment in Google as a software engineer. I see potential in using AI/ML as assistive tech with human intervention — from screening for mental health considering the poor doctor-patient ratio, to personalising education to the pace of the student.

"

Riddhi Chatterjee, another gold medallist in IMTech, said, "I'll be helping streamline processes at contact centres (call centres) using AI/ML and plan further studies in the domain. AI has the potential, and one must refrain from the hype and delve deeper into the theoretical aspects — that is where the actual beauty of AI lies. So if you can master the theory, you're definitely going to be hands-on.""If you want to really do something great in ML, you have to know the basics of it — the maths behind it.

Only then can you build something meaningful. Otherwise, it will just be a model that takes in garbage and outputs garbage," he added.AI is in every field now, he added, pointing to healthcare, construction, education with AI-based tutors, and autonomous driving where reinforcement learning is used. "I want to carry forward my research and activities in computer vision as well — I worked on a project to detect autism, analysing video of the person doing some task.

Computer vision, in general, is where my interest lies," said Chatterjee.Anshul Madurwar, a gold medallist in IMTech, is part of the team that got the patent for a system and method for assisting the visually impaired with a mouse which has a Braille device installed on it.Core skills still vitalIIIT-B director Prof Debabrata Das agreed that the highest salaries go to AI/ML-equipped students, but added that core skills are needed too.

"Now 20% of employers ask for skills from advanced courses — AI, ML, etc. But they too are asking for it in addition to domain knowledge, coding knowledge, and your analytical skills."In the backdrop of the silver jubilee convocation ceremony at the institute, Das added that IIIT-B's Digital Public Infrastructure is now deployed in over 60 countries, and its flagship MOSIP (Modular Open Source Identity Platform) — a secure, open-source digital ID platform — is in 27 countries, and will cater to nearly one billion people by 2028. Besides, the institute is nominated as the Lead Knowledge Institution (LKI) by NITI Aayog for evidence-based policy interventions.

Also, in partnership with Microsoft Research, the AI Innovation and Inclusion Initiative (A4I) has been rolled out to 1,000 govt school teachers in Karnataka to better pedagogy.