IIT-Madras Startup’s AI-For-India Event Sets Guinness Record

CHENNAI: As many as 112,314 students, IT professionals and others participated in the ‘AI-For-India’ event conducted on April 24 and 25. The event organised by IIT-Madras incubated startup GUVI and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) to upskill the participants in python programming language set the world Guinness record for ‘most number of users to take a programming lesson in 24 hours,’ surpassing the previous record by 50 times more participants.
In addition, as many as 1.43 lakh users took part in the online training session to build a face recognition app during the same event.

Swapnil Dangarikar, official adjudicator, Guinness World Records, presented the certificate during the online event held on April 30. The ‘AI-For-India’ had participants from a cross-section of the society – from school students to professionals.
“Non-engineering students, those pursuing graduation and even school students have taken part in the event. This is the second world record that AICTE has been involved in the past one year. AICTE will continue to work with startups like GUVI,” said Rajive Kumar, member secretary of All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE).
“It was a good goal to learn artificial intelligence and Python. Artificial intelligence has a lot of applications including agriculture, automotive industry and even in parking of vehicles,” said Anil D Sahasrabudhe, chairman of the AICTE.
Students and working professionals from all parts of the country, from the urban centres to those in remote villages, worked on their mobile phones and laptops to take programming lessons in Python during this landmark event.
The participants learnt on how to build a facial recognition app from scratch. Unlike regular IT workshops, the medium of instruction was in three regional languages — Tamil, Telugu and Hindi besides English.
The startup announced that the courses on Python and Face recognition will be offered for free for learning until the end of May 2021. The certification for that Python course will be available on paying a minimal fee of Rs 1,770 as it is issued by IIT-Madras.

Source: ToI