The Indian Institute of Soil and Water Conservation (ICAR-IISWC) in Dehradun organized a workshop on the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) for scientists, staff, and professionals from various ICAR institutes and organizations. The workshop, conducted in a hybrid mode, took place on May 21, 2024.

In his concluding remarks, Dr. M. Madhu, Director of IISWC, emphasized the benefits of the program for scientists and professionals. He advocated for the sensible use of modern tools and online platforms to enhance research outcomes.

Dr. M. Muruganandam, Principal Scientist and Head of the PME & KM Unit, and one of the program coordinators, highlighted the workshop's success in identifying potential opportunities in AI and NLP for effective content creation and faster dissemination.

Earlier, Sh. Ashutosh Kumar Tiwari, Deputy Director (OL) at IISWC, Dehradun, presented an in-depth overview of AI and NLP. He covered various concepts, logical steps, and underlying principles, emphasizing the use of rule-based linguistics and the advantages of Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) over Central Processing Units (CPUs) for speed and accuracy. He also discussed the importance of datasets over databases, tokenization, stemming, lemmatization, syntactic and semantic analysis, vectorization, and coding, which contribute to the effectiveness of AI and NLP tools for R&D organizations.

The program underscored the importance of maintaining creativity and ethical considerations while leveraging the potential of AI and NLP. It also briefly addressed the capabilities of tools like ChatGPT-3.5, 4.0, BARD, and Gemini in various contexts.

A total of 95 participants, including 80 online attendees from different centers of the institute and other ICAR institutes and organizations, participated in the workshop. During the Q&A session, attendees discussed various attributes, challenges, and future directions for AI and NLP in their fields.