Important Facts for Prelims (13th February 2019) | 13 Feb 2019

Recently International Business Machines Corporation's (IBM's) artificial intelligence (AI) system- Project Debater lost the public debate with a human champion, Harish Natarajan, at Think 2019 in San Francisco, U.S.
The winner of the event was determined by Project Debater's ability to convince the audience of the persuasiveness of the arguments.
Project Debater is taught to debate unfamiliar topics, as long as these are well covered in the massive corpus that the system mines including hundreds of millions of articles from numerous well-known newspapers and magazines.
Project Debater is endowed with three capabilities:
- data-driven speech writing and delivery,
- listening comprehension that can identify key claims hidden within long continuous spoken language and
- modelling human dilemmas in a unique knowledge graph to enable principled arguments.

Note:

A decade ago, IBM's supercomputer Deep Blue defeated then world chess champion, Gary Kasparov.
In March 2016, Alphabet-owned AI firm DeepMind’s computer programme, AlphaGo, beat Go (ancient Chinese game) champion Lee Sedol.
On 7 December 2017, AlphaZero (modelled on AlphaGo) took just four hours to learn all chess rules and master the game enough to defeat the world’s strongest open-source chess engine, Stockfish.

Recently Ministry of Women and Child Development organized the 4^th meeting of National Council on India’s Nutrition Challenges under POSHAN Abhiyaan.
POSHAN Abhiyaan (National Nutrition Mission) was launched by the government on March 8, 2018.
The Abhiyaan targets to reduce stunting, undernutrition, anemia (among young children, women and adolescent girls) and reduce low birth weight.
The target of the mission is to bring down stunting among children in the age group 0-6 years from 38.4% to 25% by 2022.
POSHAN Abhiyaan aims to ensure service delivery and interventions by use of technology, behavioural change through convergence and lays-down specific targets to be achieved across different monitoring parameters.

The National Council on India’s Nutrition Challenges

Set up under the Poshan Abhiyaan, the Council is also known as National Council on Nutrition (NCN).
The NCN is headed by the Vice-Chairman of the NITI Aayog.
It provides policy directions to address nutritional challenges in the country and review programmes.
It is national level coordination and convergence body on nutrition.

Union Minister for Food Processing Industries has commissioned Godavari Mega Aqua Food Park at West Godavari District, Andhra Pradesh.
This is India’s first Mega Aqua Food Park operationalized exclusively for fish and marine products processing in the state of Andhra Pradesh.
The facilities at aqua food park include the pre-processing, freezing line for Fish and shrimp, ice plant and food testing laboratory.
The modern infrastructure for food processing created at Park will benefit the farmers, growers, processors, and consumers of Andhra Pradesh and adjoining areas immensely and prove to be a big boost to the growth of the food processing sector in the State of Andhra Pradesh.

Mega Food Park

To give a major boost to the food processing sector by adding value and reducing food wastage at each stage of the supply chain with a particular focus on perishables, Ministry of Food Processing Industries is implementing Mega Food Park Scheme in the country.
It aims to link agricultural production to the market by bringing together farmers, processors, and retailers.
Mega Food Parks create modern infrastructure facilities for food processing along the value chain from farm to market with strong forward linkages (market and transport etc) and backward linkages (raw material, packaging etc) through a cluster-based approach.
Common facilities and enabling infrastructure is created at Central Processing Centre (CPC) and facilities for primary processing and storage is created near the farm in the form of Primary Processing Centers (PPCs) and Collection Centers (CCs).
The financial assistance under the scheme is provided in the form of a grant-in-aid, i.e. 50% of eligible project cost in general areas and 75% of eligible project cost in North East Region and difficult areas (Hilly States and ITDP areas) subject to a maximum of Rs. 50 crore per project.

The Government of India is formulating a Scheme ‘Kisan Urja Suraksha evam Utthaan Mahabhiyan (KUSUM)’ which aims to promote use of solar energy among the farmers.
The proposed scheme provides for:
- Setting up of grid-connected renewable power plants each of 500 KW to 2 MW in the rural area,
- Installation of standalone off-grid solar water pumps to fulfil irrigation needs of farmers not connected to grid, and
- Solarization of existing grid-connected agriculture pumps to make farmers independent of grid supply and also sell surplus solar power generated to Discom and get extra income.
The farmers will have to tolerate only 10% of the total expenditure to acquire an install a solar pumps. The Central Govt. will provide 60% cost while the remaining 30% will be taken care of by bank as credit.