Solving societal challenges with AI through partnerships

Wadhwani AI was inaugurated a little more than a year ago with the mission of bringing the power of AI to address societal challenges, especially among underserved communities throughout the world. We aim to address problems all major domains including health, agriculture, education, infrastructure, and financial inclusion. We are currently working on three solutions (two in health and one in agriculture) and are exploring more areas where we can apply AI for social good.The most important lesson that we have learned during our short stint is the importance of working in close partnership with other stakeholders and players in the social sectors, especially NGOs and Government organizations. In this talk, I will use one case, namely that of developing an AI based approach for Integrated Pest Management (IPM) in Cotton Farming, to describe how this partnership based approach has evolved and been critical to our solution development and implementation.

Speaker bio: Dr. P. Anandan is the CEO of Wadhwani Institute of Artificial Intelligence. His prior experience includes - Adobe Research Lab India (2016-2017) as a VP for Research and a Distinguished Scientist and Managing Director at Microsoft Research (1997-2014). He was also the founding director of Microsoft Research India which he ran from 2005-2014. Earlier stint was at Sarnoff Corporation (1991-1997) as a researcher and an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Yale University (1987-1991). His primary research area is Computer vision where he is well known for his fundamental and lasting contributions to the problem of visual motion analysis. He received his PhD in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1987, a Masters in Computer Science from University of Nebraska, Lincoln in 1979 and his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras, India in 1977. He is a distinguished alumnus of IIT Madras, and UMass, Amherst and is on the Nebraska Hall of Computing. His hobbies include playing African drums, writing poems (in Tamil) and travel which makes his work related travel interesting.