AN INDIAN professor has faced backlash after suggesting that a robot dog displayed at a major AI summit in New Delhi was developed by her university, even though the model is sold by Chinese startup Unitree.
The silver mechanical dog was displayed at a booth run by the private Galgotias University at the AI Impact Summit this week.
In a televised interview on Tuesday, professor Neha Singh introduced the robot to an Indian TV reporter and said it had been developed by the university.
“You need to meet Orion,” Singh told the reporter as the robot dog performed tricks such as waving at the camera and springing up on its hind legs.
“This has been developed by the centres of excellence at the Galgotias University,” Singh said, while speaking about the institution’s investments in artificial intelligence.
“As you can see, it can take all shapes and sizes... it’s quite naughty also,” she said.
After the comments triggered online criticism, Galgotias University issued a statement on social media platform X.
“Let us be clear -- Galgotias has not built this robodog, neither have we claimed,” the university said.
It said the “recently acquired” Unitree robodog is a “classroom in motion” and that “our students are experimenting with it, testing its limits”.
The university added that while it did not build the machine, “what we are building are minds that will soon design, engineer, and manufacture such technologies”.
Singh later told reporters on Wednesday that “things may not have been expressed clearly”.
“I did not communicate it properly,” said Singh, a professor of communications.
Galgotias student Vaidik Mishra said the controversy was unnecessary.
“We were so hopeful that this summit would give us a platform to talk about our start-up. But now it is all about us lying about the robot, which is not even true. It was just a misunderstanding,” he told AFP.
India’s opposition Congress party used the incident to criticise Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is hosting nearly 20 world leaders and dozens more national delegations at the five-day summit.
“The Modi government has made a laughing stock of India globally, with regard to AI. In the ongoing AI summit, Chinese robots are being displayed as our own,” the party wrote in a post on X.
“This is truly embarrassing for India,” it added, calling the incident “brazenly shameless”.
The TV reporter who conducted the interview, Tapas Bhattachary, asked viewers to take a wider view.
“If one out of hundreds of exhibitors wasn’t being upfront about their innovation, I would not give up on the entire India’s youth who are very innovative,” Bhattachary said.
(With inputs from agencies)
