NEW DELHI, Dec. 7 (Xinhua) -- India's think tank on policy making -- NITI Aayog has partnered with a Singapore-based artificial intelligence (AI) firm to launch the "AI4All Global Hackathon", inviting developers, students, start-ups and companies to develop AI applications to make significant positive social and economic impact for India.

The objective of this hackathon is to promote awareness and subsequently develop solutions that deliver the twin benefits of efficient computing to address the infrastructure challenges, while also not compromising on privacy of data for training AI algorithms, said an official statement in this regard.

The first stage will invite ideas for use cases of multi-party computation in areas such as healthcare, education, agriculture, urbanization, financial inclusion. The second stage will call for these ideas to be matured and developed, with a focus on privacy preserving AI and distributed computing.

Winners will share in a prize pool worth 50,000 U.S. dollars in both cash and non-cash rewards. Participants will also get mentorship and support from the hackathon co-sponsors, including the opportunity to scale and implement their AI applications.

The hackathon will be run in two stages, with the first stage ending on January 15 and the next stage, which will only include shortlisted participants from the previous stage, will conclude on March 15.

According to the official statement, the challenge question seeks to develop solutions in "Distributed Computing and Privacy Preserving" techniques, such as multi-party computation, in AI.

With the vision to further expand the idea of AI, NITI Aayog organises hackathons to source sustainable, innovative and technologically-enabled solutions to address various challenges in the development space.