With new partnerships in India and Thailand, Google aims to facilitate 6 million free AI screenings for diabetic retinopathy in underserved communities over the next decade. The AI model, which underwent early research and development in India, has already supported more than 600,000 screenings in clinics worldwide.
“Each of these partners will own, operate, deploy, and maintain the AI model, and will work with local regulatory bodies to secure the necessary approvals to scale the program at a population level,” said Sunny Virmani, Group Product Manager for Health AI Research at Google.
In addition to healthcare, Google is driving sustainability with its CircularNet model, an open-source machine-learning computer vision model designed to sort waste by identifying materials. The model assesses the quality and quantity of waste before sorting, baling, and sending it to recycling centers.
In a pilot of CircularNet’s AI model at its material recycling facility, Bengaluru-based Saahas Zero Waste reported 85% accuracy in detecting plastic waste.
In agriculture, Google has opened access to developers for its Agricultural Landscape Understanding (ALU) Research API, which uses satellite imagery to identify fields, water bodies, and vegetation boundaries.
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“The ALU API, developed through collaborations between Google’s AnthroKrishi team, researchers, and state and union governments across India, demonstrates our commitment to empowering India’s agricultural ecosystem,” said Alok Talekar, Engineering Lead at Google DeepMind India.“This technology is designed to equip the ecosystem with tools to tackle rising productivity challenges alongside climate threats with targeted interventions,” Talekar added.
Google DeepMind’s India unit is also spearheading Project Vaani, a collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and ARTPARK (Artificial Intelligence & Robotics Technology Park). The Indic language AI project aims to cover 125 Indian languages and dialects to build an inclusive and equitable Indic AI.
The project’s first phase has created an open-source database of over 14,000 hours of speech data across 58 languages, collected from 80,000 speakers in 80 districts, said Manish Gupta, Director of Google DeepMind, Google India.
First announced in December 2022, Project Vaani plans to collect and transcribe 154,000 hours of anonymized speech data from all 773 districts in India. Gupta noted that phase two is underway, covering 160 districts across all states.
