IIT Kharagpur’s Undergraduate Students Exploring AI Innovations

NEW DELHI, JULY 5: An AI-based intelligent traffic control system could revolutionize traffic management in India. Already, the Delhi Traffic Police is mulling over the matter. At IIT Kharagpur, undergraduate students are taking up the challenge to come forward with innovations in AI under the up.AI initiative organized by the Institute’s Centre for Artificial Intelligence.

An undergraduate student team -Bits n Bytes – has developed an exhaustive model of such an AI system based on real-time traffic feed. The intelligent traffic control system devised by Y. Sai Sanjeet, P. Anusha and P.V.S.L Hari Chandana of the winning team uses a deep reinforcement learning architecture to dynamically adjust traffic signals’ duration using a Deep Q network. The idea is to reduce the waiting time of vehicles at traffic intersections and allow a smooth flow of traffic.

“Compared to the existing approaches that focus on traffic signal optimization for a single intersection, our approach is based on a collaborative control of traffic signal phases of multiple intersections,” said Hari Chandana. The model, the team says, is adaptable and can be used to control traffic in any area by simulating the road network and training the model on it. The model can then be used to intelligently control the real-time traffic in that particular road network. Subrat Panda, Head of AI and Data Sciences at Capillary Technologies mentored this student group.

Another student team EduFYI also tackles a relevant problem. It proposes an AI tool to automatically guide its users through a distance learning course, helping them to learn faster and more efficiently. In online distance learning courses, it often becomes difficult for instructors to answer individual doubts and questions. With the classification of these questions into educational categories, the instructor can hope to better address student queries. At the same time, students can get a better evaluation of their understanding of the study material.

Divyansh, who was guided by Prof. Jiaul Paik, says, “For our task, we decided to classify the questions based on Bloom’s taxonomy”. The project has led to a model that has shown 80 per cent test accuracy and, it is hoped, will improve personalized learning such as in the online MOOC sector.

There is a third-team Tint-AI, proposes an AI-based Intelligent Automated Software Applications (iASA) system to replace the prevalent ASA or Applicant Tracking Systems in the recruitment industry. The lone member team of Kumar Aniket was mentored by Arindam Chatterjee of HSBC Global Analytics, India, and Poornima Muthuswamy of Innovation Team Wells, Fargo, California.

‘Tint’ has several components – Resume Job Matcher, Job Recommender System, Automatic Resume Summarizer based on NLP and Automatic Resume Scoring that takes into account not only how the resume scores across different fields of education and professional degrees but also word count per section such as experience, leadership, projects etc. Aniket says, “Strategic use of AI, combined with the personal touch of human recruiters can help companies fill open positions faster and with more qualified candidates.”

The projects have been adjudged the best student projects in the up.AI Challenge organized by the student to promote AI innovations.

Anirban Santra, a doctoral scholar at the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering and Program Chair of up.AI said, “Several of the ideas presented at the up.AI Challenge may have been visited before. But what is important is that undergraduate students took up the challenge to use AI to come up with solutions and learnt a lot in the process.” Many of the participants have plans to further develop their ideas. Kumar Aniket, for example, wants to develop a Virtual Interview Analyzer.

Prof. Sudeshna Sarkar, Head of Centre for Artificial Intelligence opined, “There is tremendous student interest in AI. There is great enthusiasm among students including undergraduate students in core AI research as well as in developing innovative applications. The Centre for AI will like to play a role in providing courses, workshops and infrastructure to support student training and innovation and to encourage students to aim higher.”