In an effort to produce highly skilled technical professionals, the Government Technology Agency or GovTech organised a three-month-long training about machine learning. ICT professionals from the corporate and private sectors attended the training which ended last week. Machine learning is a branch of Artificial Intelligence and computer science that builds computer systems which can imitate intelligent human behaviour. Such training is expected to help Bhutan achieve its vision of digital transformation.
20 ICT professionals from the private sector, corporate offices, IT graduates and employees of tech startup companies attended the training.
GovtTech organised the training with Omdena, a community from India that focuses on building innovative, ethical, and efficient Artificial Intelligence and Data Science solutions to real-world problems.
Besides machine learning, they are being trained in machine learning operations. This will help them use Artificial Intelligence to solve real-world problems.
At the end of the training, the participants, with the help of their instructor, created a prototype of AI that will be able to predict landslides in Bhutan.
“It’s a real-life application system because we have some data from the landslides so we have some past data that says from this given parameter this is the probability of getting a landslide and we are going to train the ML model with it. In future, if we have a second parameter, this ML model will be able to tell us that there is a chance of getting a landslide so that we can act accordingly. It can help save some lives so the same application, is the ML system. It would be useful to the community,” said Devarsh Patel, MI & MLOps Instructor.
The landslide prediction project is a stepping stone for the participants to develop various other projects. The participants are keen to work on projects that will make management easier in Bhutan since Machine Learning Operations can be used to create applications that will make work fast, efficient and accurate.
“I can start training models now. I can get to and do a lot more research work, getting data sets from anywhere I want to and start training and deploying it. Especially I think in our country like in the health sectors, we can predict the cancer patient like how and what are the chances of getting, if I have some symptoms I can feed it into a model, then they will predict if I have certain kind of diseases or not, whom I have to meet; from doctors which specialist we have to go meet,” said Rashme Gurung, a participant.
GovTech says this training is just the beginning of their initiative to achieve digital transformation. They will be initiating more such training in the future.
