Patna: Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Patna director Pushpak Bhattacharyya has been appointed chairman of the committee for standardisation in artificial intelligence set up by the Bureau of Indian Standards under the ministry of consumer affairs.

Artificial intelligence or AI is the theory and development of computer system which is able to perform tasks that requires human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making and even language translation.

Apart from IIT-Patna, the committee headed by Bhattacharyya has members and representatives from premier educational and research institutes such as Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, IIT-Delhi, IIT-Bombay, IIT-Madras, IIT-Kanpur, IIIT-Hyderabad.

The committee will also have representatives from TCS, Google India, IBM India, Samsung, CSI (Computer Society of India), IBM Research, Intel Research and Microsoft Research. Representatives from ministry of electronics and information technology (Centre for Artificial Intelligence & Robotics) will also assist other team members.

The committee will be focusing on cyber security, safety, legal and ethical issues in IT, technological mapping, leveraging artificial intelligence for national missions and other projects. Bhattacharyya said: "A lot of work is being done in artificial intelligence in US and Europe. The Indian government is also working on this front and the committee that has been formed will work on standardisation of projects in artificial intelligence."

He said: "Since many start-ups are working on different projects in artificial intelligence, the committee's main task will be to go through the projects to find if or not standardisation has been maintained in the projects."

Bhattacharyya is professor of computer science and engineering at IIT-Bombay. Bhattacharyya has a BTech from IIT-Kharagpur (1984) and an Mtech from IIT-Kanpur (1986). He is known for his contributions to natural language processing and has several distinctions in the field.