BEL’s strategic and R&D plans have been made by defining a clear roadmap for the next three-five years, consisting of long-term projects / goals using AI and Big Data Analytics
While CRL has built the Technology Demonstrator for first responder robots for land forces, do you have plans for robots for all the three services?
BEL has plans and roadmaps for robots for all the three services. From nano drones to combat UAVs, the unmanned aerial vehicles can act as a first responder robot for different applications. The autonomous amphibious and underwater robots are planned for future endeavours.
Considering the defence ministry has not given out its strategy for AI, which should ideally be part of the national strategy articulated by NITI Aayog, what constraints in terms of clearly defined roadmap, financial allocations, and collaborations with friendly foreign companies are being felt by BEL?
BEL being a Navratna DPSU that meets the defence forces’ requirements, venturing into collaborations will help reap immense benefits. Keeping pace with the changing environment and state-of-the-art technology has always been BEL’s strategy.
Towards this, BEL is actively collaborating with several academic institutions such as IITs (Chennai, Delhi, Kharagpur, Kanpur, etc), IIITs (Bangalore, Hyderabad and Kottayam), Bennett University – Noida, IISc.
The learnings from the existing partnership with BEL-Thales Systems Limited, BEL’s Joint Venture company, will enable BEL to collaborate further with many other reputed foreign companies in the future. Also, BEL’s strategic and R&D plans have been made by defining a clear roadmap for the next three-five years, consisting of long-term projects / goals using AI and Big Data Analytics. We have also targeted 10-13 new AI enabled products per year to contribute to the turnover.
What are your planned projects for mission-mode AI in the next five years? Would you be seeking a foreign partner in these in addition to private sector, academia, and start-ups?
Some of the long-term AI enabled products are decision support systems for C4I, Network Centric Warfare and Communication Systems, Fault Detection and Decision Analytics for Underwater / Naval Systems, Radar Fingerprinting and EW Systems, Predictive Maintenance for mission critical systems, Homeland Security and Smart Cities, Virtual Reality enabled war gaming emulators, etc. Most of the systems are targeted to be developed in-house, collaborating with academia, industries and start-ups. Collaboration with foreign academic institutions is also planned in this segment.
Does BEL have plans to do joint papers with academia in both AI core research and AI applications?
Yes. We have already tied up with most of the Indian premier institutions such as IISc, IITs and IIITs on collaborative R&D mode. Technical papers and white papers that are being published as part of the core AI work happening as part of these collaborations shall be presented and published as agreed upon between BEL and the partners.
What is BEL’s short, medium- and long-term plans for cyber space ecosystem by AI means?
Some of the initiatives in the Cyber Security domain are malware detection in mobile devices, data leak prevention, end system integrity management, context-based authentication schemes, cyber crime analytics for Law Enforcement and State Police Departments, IoT Security, Block Chain, Certification Authority (CA) services, Digital Forensics including Cloud / IoT forensics and Information Warfare technologies.
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