The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Thursday has released recommendations on “Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data in Telecommunication Sector”, in which it has suggested for an urgent need to adopt a regulatory framework.
“There is an urgent need to adopt a regulatory framework by the government that should be applicable across sectors. The regulatory framework should ensure that specific AI use cases are regulated on a risk-based framework where high risk use cases that directly impact humans are regulated through legally binding obligations,” it said.
An independent statutory authority should be established immediately for ensuring development of responsible AI and regulation of use cases in India, it said, adding that the authority should be designated as “Artificial Intelligence and Data Authority of India (AIDAI)“.
The broad tenets of the suggested regulatory framework should comprise of an independent statutory authority; a Multi Stakeholder Body (MSB) that will act as an advisory body to the proposed statutory authority; categorisations of the AI use cases based on their risk and regulating them according to broad principles of responsible AI, the sector regulator said.
The AIDAI should have functions including framing regulations on various aspects of AI including its responsible use; defining principles of responsible AI and their applicability on AI use cases based on risk assessment.
“AIDAI should evolve the framework based on its assessment, advice of proposed MSB, global best practices, and public consultation, ensuring that principles of responsible AI are made applicable at each phase of AI framework lifecycle like design, development, validation, deployment, monitoring and refinement,” TRAI said in the recommendations.
The MSB should be constituted by the government to act as an advisory body to AIDAI drawing members from different Ministries/ Departments, industry, legal expert, cyber expert, academia and research institutes. MSB may invite representatives of relevant Ministry/ Department of Centre/ State government on need basis as special invitee.
Department of Telecommunications (DoT) should collaborate with access service providers for enhancing the capability of currently deployed systems through use of AI/ ML and other new technologies, in order to analyse the data on real-time basis for verification of the total number of mobile connections (across access service providers and across licensed service areas) against the limit set by DoT, it further said.
“DoT’s Telecom Security Operation Centre (TSOC) should deploy AI/ML and other new technologies-based tools for generating alerts to minimise network security threats,” TRAI added.
Published on July 21, 2023
