Talk Title, Abstract & Bio of Speakers
Dr. Girish Chowdhary, Associate Professor, UIUC
Presentation Schedule: 9:10 am - 9:55 am
Talk Title: The Robots are Coming - to your Farm!
Abstract: What if a team of robots grew your food for you? In this talk, I will discuss some key advances in robotics, machine learning, and autonomy that could enable teams of small robots to grow more varied, tastier, and healthier food in a fundamentally more sustainable way.
Teams of autonomous small aerial and ground robots could be a potential solution to many of the serious problems that modern agriculture is facing. However, fully autonomous robots that operate without supervision for weeks, months, or entire growing season are not yet practical. I will discuss my group's theoretical and practical work towards the underlying challenging problems in robotic systems, autonomy, sensing, and learning. I will begin with our lightweight, compact, and autonomous field robot TerraSentia and the recent successes of this type of under-canopy robots for high-throughput phenotyping with deep learning-based machine vision. I will then discuss advancements to visual navigation, reinforcement learning, and onboard AI for increasing levels of autonomy to address other pressing problems in agriculture throughout the world, including regenerating soil health and sequestering carbon with cover-crop planting robots.
Bio: Girish Chowdhary is an associate professor and Donald Biggar Willet Faculty Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the director of the Field Robotics Engineering and Science Hub (FRESH) at UIUC and the Chief Scientist on the Illinois Autonomous Farm. Girish holds a joint appointment with Agricultural and Biological Engineering and Computer Science, he is a member of the UIUC Coordinated Science Lab, and holds affiliate appointments in Aerospace Engineering and Electrical Engineering. He holds a PhD (2010) from Georgia Institute of Technology in Aerospace Engineering. He was a postdoc at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2011-2013), and an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University (2013-2016). He also worked with the German Aerospace Center's (DLR's) Institute of Flight Systems for around three years (2003-2006). He is the winner of the Air Force Young Investigator Award, and several best paper awards, including a best systems paper award at RSS 2018 for his recent work on the agricultural robot TerraSentia. He is the co-founder of EarthSense Inc.
Dr. Sidhant Gupta, Director, Microsoft
Presentation Schedule: 9:55 am - 10:40 am
Talk Title: Microsoft Premonition: Scalable Monitoring of the Biome.
Abstract:Premonition started as a research question, particularly asking, what if we could predict epidemics like we predict the weather?
Disease epidemics have impacted every society and economy in human history. The key to reducing future epidemics is the early detection of potential pathogens — before they cause large disease outbreaks. This gives researchers time to develop new treatments, public health organizations time to prepare responses, and individuals time to minimize their exposure to sources of disease risk.
However, detecting pathogens before they cause outbreaks is no easy task. Pathogens move through the environment in complex ways that are difficult to monitor by traditional methods. It is estimated that 60 – 75% of emerging infectious diseases are caused by pathogens that jump from animals to people. Viruses like Zika, dengue and West Nile move between humans, animals, and mosquitoes in complex cycles. Yet, today we have limited technologies and capacity to monitor potential pathogens as they move through the environment.
The goal of Microsoft Premonition is scalable monitoring of the environment to detect disease threats early, using robotics and genomics. Our robotic smart traps continuously monitor the environment for important types of insects, such as mosquitoes, which both transmit pathogens and collect blood samples from other animals. Meanwhile, our cloud-scale genomic analyses try to identify all the species of organisms and viruses in environmental samples to spot new transmission patterns.
Bio:Sidhant Gupta is the Director of Product Incubation, a researcher, and strategist in the Health Futures Group at Microsoft. Currently he oversees the commercialization efforts for Microsoft Premonition. He also works across the organization to set the incubation and investment strategy in healthcare.
Sidhant graduated with a Doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 2014 and a MS from Georgia Tech in 2009. His award-winning graduate research was built on his philosophy of “sensing everywhere without putting sensors everywhere”, that is to find ways to sense signals with minimal hardware that is easy to install and low-cost. During his Ph.D. work, he invented a device that plugs into a home’s electrical outlet that let homeowners see not just how much energy their home consumes but also how it is used – i.e. it shows power usage of each and every appliance using only a single plug-in sensor. His published work has received 10 best paper awards and nominations and has been the basis of several successful commercialization efforts. Sidhant was named one of the top 30 technology disrupters under the age of 30 by Forbes in 2014.
Outside of his Microsoft roles, Sidhant currently serves as the chairman for Ideagen – an organization committed to working on the United Nations global goals, as a board member for iGIANT – a non-profit committed to ensuring that organization around the world innovate keeping sex/gender difference in mind, as an affiliate faculty in EE at University of Washington and as a General Partner at 3Force Capital, a purpose driven VC firm to help accelerate UN SDGs.
Dr. Hemant Misra, Vice President, Head of Applied Research, Swiggy
Presentation Schedule: 10:40 am - 11:25 am
Talk Title: AI in Startups: A peek into Swiggy's journey and lessons learnt
Abstract: Thanks to recent progress in deep learning architectures, current AI is typically data intensive (needs a lot of data to train a good model) and infrastructure intensive (needs powerful machines to crunch the data). The last, and perhaps the most important, component to execute AI projects successfully is a well trained AI team that understands theory, has practical problem solving skills and is exposed to end-to-end system thinking.
When compared to conventional large established companies, in a typical startup company the emphasis is on doing more with less without compromising on the quality and speed of execution. This talk is about how we devised our AI strategy and what are the lessons we can share from our journey with the students and entrepreneurs who may be embarking on their own startup journey.
Bio: Hemant Misra is an active researcher in the areas of text and signal processing, speech/speaker recognition, machine learning, healthcare applications and education. He did his MS (1999) from IIT, Madras, and PhD from EPFL (2006). Then he held post-doc positions at Telecom ParisTech, University of Glasgow, and Xerox Research Centre Europe. After having successful stints at Philips (Healthcare) Research, IBM's India Research Lab and Citicorp Services India, currently Hemant is 'VP - Head of Applied Research' at Swiggy.
Mr. Abhijith Neerkaje, Sr. Director Data Sciences, Target
Presentation Schedule: 2:10 pm - 2:55 pm
Talk Title: Scalable AI in the Retail Context
Abstract:Retail is a highly competitive and fast changing industry. It deals with delivering goods and services at scale to millions of customers worldwide. A typical retail store has anywhere between 50 K to 100 K unique items. Millions of customers visit retail stores and websites every week. Hence retail business problems like forecasting , supply chain management , pricing and marketing are perfect applications to use big data and AI. In this talk I will dive deep into the supply chain management problem of a typical retail store. We try to understand how items appear reliably on the shelf every day. Through the case study I will explain the various design choices and trade-offs that an AI scientist needs to make, to deliver AI solutions at scale. I will also spend some time delving into nontechnical aspects that are important to successfully deploy and drive adoption of AI solutions.
Bio: Abhijith Neerkaje is Sr. Director of Data Science and Analytics at Target. In his role Abhijith builds products that leverage machine learning algorithms to enhance the capabilities and efficiency of Target’s Pricing and Merchandising functions. He has over 15 years of experience leading high performing teams across various sectors ranging from retail, semiconductor manufacturing and energy. Abhijith received his bachelor’s degree in Engineering from PESIT in Bangalore. He also holds post graduate degrees in engineering and management from Indian Institute of Science Bangalore and Massachusetts Institute of Technology USA.
Dr. Gautam Shroff, SVP and Head, TCS Research
Presentation Schedule: 2:55 pm - 3:40 pm
Talk Title: Applied/Fundamental AI: Synergy or Dichotomy?
Abstract: I will first describe a few real-life examples of deep-learning applied in traditional enterprises and highlight challenges often faced for practical deployment. Next I will recap a recent debate on the future of deep-learning and/or AI, i.e., 'symbolic' vs 'connectionist' AI, and share some of our related recent work on 'neural analogical reasoning'.
Bio: Dr. Gautam Shroff is a Senior Vice President in TCS and heads TCS Research. He has published over 125 research papers in the areas of computational mathematics, parallel computation, distributed systems, software architecture, software engineering, big data, information fusion, virtual reality as well as artificial intelligence including machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. He has written two books "Enterprise Cloud Computing" published by Cambridge University Press, UK, in October 2010, and “The Intelligent Web”, published by Oxford University Press, UK, in 2013. He is a TCS Fellow as well as a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering.
Prior to joining TCS in 1998, Dr. Shroff had been on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA (1990 - 91) and thereafter of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India (1991 - 1997). He has also held visiting positions at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA, and at Argonne National Labs in Chicago. He completed his B.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1985, and Ph.D in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, NY in 1990.
Dr. Gargi Dasgupta, GTO Executive Lead, IBM Research
Presentation Schedule: 3:40 pm - 4:25 pm
Talk Title: AI and its application to the Future of Automated Operations
Abstract: This problem statement is particularly relevant in understanding how to manage this new architecture of multiple microservices across the cloud stack. Operational data artifacts span across logs, metrics, tickets, and traces. Looking at signals across the artifacts and across the stack presents a challenging data correlation problem. AI mechanisms can help accelerate problem determination in these complex environments. We focus on the problem of reactive, predictive and proactive problem determination.
Bio: Gargi B. Dasgupta is currently the Executive Technical Lead for the Global Technology Outlook 2023. She is also the global area strategist within the AI and Cloud pillar in IBM Research owning the relationship with relevant business units. Specifically, she leads the IBM Research strategy on Differentiating the Hybrid Cloud Platform with AI across areas of modernization, operations, network and compliance. In her previous role Gargi has served as the Director of IBM Research, India and CTO of India, South Asia for the last three years. Gargi also serves as the Diversity leader at IBM Research India dedicated to promoting women in STEM. She is the recipient of the ACM India Outstanding Contributions by a Women Researcher (OCCW) in the area of computing, 2021. She has featured in the Fortune India and Business Today’s list of influential women in Indian Business from 2019-2021.