At the IGIC 2024 event in Bengaluru, a research scholar from Singapore highlighted a curious trend: grants were being awarded to studies that merely mentioned AI. Interestingly, India’s AI research scene has seen some dramatic rise lately.
In 2023, India published 17,000 AI papers, a significant increase from fewer than 4,000 just a decade ago. This surge pushed India past the UK, which previously held the fourth position.
However, the question is how relevant are these papers?
‘AI’ : The Keyword
Several researchers aimed to measure the difference in research quality. In 2020, Klinger et al studied the development and variety of topics in AI research and looked at how much private companies influence this research. They analysed around 90,000 AI-related papers from arXiv.org.
Later in 2021, Hagendorff and Meding analysed 10,000 machine learning papers from three major conferences (CVPR, NeurIPS, and ICML) published between 2015 and 2019. They categorised the papers by searching for academic and industry-related words in the full text.
Their findings showed that the number of papers involving both academia and industry is increasing. They measured the impact of papers by their median number of citations and found that industry-affiliated papers received more citations than academic ones.
However, this difference decreases over time as newer papers accumulate citations more slowly.
They also found that academic papers were about two years behind industry papers in mentioning trending topics like “adversarial” and “deep learning”. An analysis of social impact terms showed no significant difference between academic and industry papers.
India’s Patent System
In the 2017-2022 period, India published around 1.3 million research papers, making it the 4th largest producer of research globally.
In 2023 alone, India filed over 90,000 patents, averaging 247 per day, which marks a notable 17% increase – the highest in two decades. Despite this progress, India still does not rank among the top 10 countries for patent filings, raising questions about its position in the global innovation sector.
“Many patents attributed to Western companies are the result of work conducted in India. However, these patents are registered under the names of Western companies due to their global operations,” TV Mohandas Pai, chairman at Aarin Capital, rightly pointed out at IGIC.
Pai highlighted that the Indian research culture does not consider patent filing as an objective, which has been a hindrance. While in the US, a significant number of patents are filed defensively driven by broader strategic reasons rather than for immediate utility.
Regarding financial capital, Pai noted that over the past decade, $145 billion has been invested in India, in contrast to China’s $835 billion and the US’s $2.3 trillion. This scarcity of financial capital significantly constrains India’s growth.
“Public funding for research is insufficient, with Indian universities receiving around $800 million annually, less than what a single prominent American university might receive,” he said.
In 2020, India filed nearly 57,000 patents, which is only 4% of the 1.49 million applications filed in China and 9.5% of the 5,97,000 applications in the US.
Similarly, India granted 23,361 patents, compared to 5,30,000 in China, and 3,50,000 in the US. On average, it takes about 58 months to process a patent application in India, while it takes about 20 months in China and 23 months in the US.
What’s Next?
India needs to focus on improving its research infrastructure, increasing funding for universities, and fostering a culture that emphasises the importance of quality over quantity. Strengthening collaborations between academia and industry could further boost the quality and impact of AI research.
Leveraging its large population and data potential, India can position itself as a leading player in the next wave of AI technology and innovation.
