Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

PGP 4th Term 2021-22

Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning (AIDL)

Instructor: Rahul De’

Group Term Paper Proposal

Please prepare a one-page proposal for the group term paper that you are going
to do.

Objective of the Group Term Paper: The group assignment will consist of writing
a 3-4 page (2k words) report on an aspect of AI that impacts business – data
acquisition, type of decision to be made, quality of decision required, job
displacement/replacement, skill enhancement, competitiveness, privacy, ethics,
etc. The report may be based on primary or secondary research and data. It
should attempt to arrive at an original insight on AI and business.

Objective of One-Page proposal: The proposal should specify the problem you are
going to examine and the firm or firms you intend to study. The problem
specification should include: the aspect of AI you will examine (representation,
problem solving, learning, data acquisition, computing challenges); the problem
domain (marketing, logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, white-collar decision
making); and overall business impact of AI you intend to examine (data
acquisition, type of decision making affected, skill enhancement,
competitiveness, etc). The write-up may be in the form of a case study of AI use
in a firm or organisation.

Example Problem Specification

1. Aspect of AI - data acquisition and labelling.

2. Problem domain - Assisting school children up to Class 10 with solving maths
problems.
3. Business impact - Automated tutoring system. Question to research: how will
human tutors be affected or included? How will online tutoring sites (like
Vedantu) be affected? Is the firm offering this AI product competitively placed?

What to Submit

Please submit the one-page proposal on Moodle. The proposal should name all
group members, the group number, include a group selfie (or individual photos),
and should be submitted by one group member only. Please submit one pdf file
(filename: GroupNum_AIDL2021Proposal.pdf) by 23-July-2021.

Possible Topics

Below are a set of suggestive topics. Please select from one of these. Ideally,
each group should have a unique topic. In case two groups select the same topic,
please check with me.

1. AI in Operations.
a. Use of AI methods to scale up business operations in any sector. Consider
issues of process selection, data requirements, computing requirements, human-
machine collaboration.
b. Examine the competitive role of AI in impact scale and scope of operations.
How are new operations methods made possible, what challenges to they face.

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c. Adopting AI for operations, with a focus on how operations are modified,
people are trained, and new human-machine collaborations are effected.

2. AI use in specific domains.

a. AI use in medical diagnosis, with a focus on data acquisition, modification
of treatment operations, training of nurses, staff, and doctors, and informing
patients.
b. AI use in agriculture – with focus on particular processes for assisting
farmers. Use for sowing, nurturing, harvesting, and sale of produce. Examine how
technology can be integrated within the rural Indian landscape.
c. AI use in manufacturing – use of AI/ML algorithms to improve manufacturing
through monitoring, analysis, prediction, and control. May cover the recent
trends in Industry 4.0.
d. AI use in transportation – use of algorithms for auto driving cars, in
routing trucks and taxis, for determining allocation of facilities and vehicles.
e. AI in education – use of AI to detect learning patterns, determining student
attention and focus, assisting during exams and proctoring. Focus can on uses
and limitations of such technologies.
f. Robotic process automation – use of AI to automate and digitise everyday
business and industrial processes. RPA use in different settings, requirements
of data, training, validation.
g. AI in finance and trading.
h. AI in security and fraud detection.

3. AI Products.
a. Case discussion of AI products such as Watson, Holmes, Nia, Mana, that are
offered by various firms. These are “platform” products that blend with other
informations systems to offer advanced products and services.
b. Review of specific tools such as Tensorflow, Keras, PyTorch, CNTK, etc., that
are used to build ML and AI models. Explore how and why these algorithms are
built, their licensing strategy, their market penetration, their ability blend
with existing tools.

4. AI Ethics.
a. Face recognition – face recognition software is being banned by countries,
cities, and corporations. Though this type of AI technology is widely used (eg.,
in phones), it is now widely criticized for misuse. How are firms adapting to
the challenges, what are possible remedies for these problems.
b. Explainability of AI – AI decisions and outcomes are largely not explainable.
How is this problem being addressed by firms and through research.
c. Moral decisions – focus on decisions made by autonomous machines that have
life-death consequences (in various domains). How have firms addressed these
concerns, what concerns remain.
d. Bias in labelling and classification – bias in classifying people in various
domains (parole decisions, job selection) is a well-reported problem. How are
firms addressing these concerns, what are regulatory stands being taken.
e. AI in weapons, warfare – AI, robotics, and ML are being used to develop
deadly, precise weapons. There is a world-wide concern at these trends. What the
types of weapons being developed, how are countries, groups responding to this
challenge.
f. Emotion recognition – recognizing emotions of humans is a multi-billion
dollar application of AI technologies. They are being used in cars, schools,
hospitals, clinics, and during interviews. There is a criticism that these
algorithms do not recognize emotions correctly and are placing some people at a
disadvantage. What are the challenges of this technology, and how are they being
addressed.

5. AI and the future of the workplace

a. AI changes the workplace in many ways. Not only does it enhance efficiency
and accuracy but also changes the nature of the job, level of skills required,
hierarchy in organizations, to name a few. This has a bearing on workplace

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culture in terms of job incentives, job satisfaction, and interpersonal
interactions. How does AI change the workplace in specific domains such as
healthcare, manufacturing, IT industry, and other industries where it is being
used at present?
b. Technology could replace jobs and create new jobs. For example, with
industrialization, craftsmen were replaced with blue-collared workers. What jobs
could AI replace? What are the new jobs that AI could create?
c. The changes that emerge in the workplace have a bearing on individuals and
society. For example, with the rise of the IT industry, new concerns such as
individual surveillance became more acute. The IT industry provided
opportunities for social mobilization of the middle class in India – it created
opportunities for the middle class to accrue wealth. What changes could AI bring
to individuals and society? The observations and recommendations must be based
on an analysis of present conditions rather than extrapolating the current state
of affairs.