The Tamil Nadu govern-ment has urged the Union government to set up a Centre of Excellence for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Tamil Nadu, said Minis-ter for Information Tech-nology Palanivel Thiaga Rajan in Coimbatore on Friday.

Speaking at the Global Startup Summit, he said. the State government wants to adopt AI to im prove its functioning, and had talked to different de partments.

It then identified a set of services that can be auto-mated using AI.

"We want to have an AI open data platform that we will give to start-ups that Palanivel Thiaga Rajan can come up with models," he said. The Information Technology department has come out with four tools and is working on 26 more, and there are some models that will be used with the existing tools. For instance, through the e-parvai app, AI is used to screen patients for cata-ract. Similarly, AI is used in the Uzhavan app to vali-date crop data entry.

The department plans to implement WhatsApp-based governance to sup-plement the services of e-seva centres, and ultimate-ly, it will become chatbot-based.

Data availability

The State government has a little more than 500 sub-sidy schemes and there is good data for 370 of these.

"We want to use good data and better approach and better models and au-tomation. When we start doing these, the next step is to improve citizen and government interface," he said, speaking about how the IT department is using AI to provide better servic-es to the public.

Media: The Hindu