Scientific Attaché/ Counsellor (Science and Technology) Embassy of India, Berlin, Germany
Dr. Madhusudan Reddy Nandineni is the Scientific Attaché/ Counsellor (Science and Technology) at the Embassy of India, Berlin. Prior to this he was Staff Scientist and Group Leader, Laboratories of DNA Fingerprinting Services and Genomics and Profiling Applications at the Government of India funded Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, Hyderabad, India. He obtained his Baccalaureate degree in Microbiology from Nizam College, Hyderabad, and Master of Science Degree in Biotechnology from University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad (in Molecular Genetics). He joined the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at the Yale University School of Medicine, USA for his postdoctoral research work (in Yeast genetics and biochemistry). His current research interests include studies on human genetic diversity in Indian populations, development of novel methodologies for human forensic DNA profiling, and plant-microbe interaction studies. He has been the recipient of several awards, like Innovative Young Biotechnologists Award (IYBA-2006) from Govt. of India, BioAsia-2007 Innovation Award for Young Scientists, Max Planck India Visiting Scientist Fellowship (2007-10), Head of the Max Planck Partner Group Programme (2011-2017), Best Scientist Award from the Government of Telangana State (2018), etc.
In his current role as Counsellor (Science and Technology) at the Embassy of India, Berlin, he is responsible for Science, Technology, Innovation, and Higher Educational cooperation between India and Germany.
Science Counsellor
Science Section
German Embassy New Delhi
The Science Section at the German Embassy New Delhi is in charge of coordinating bilateral science cooperation, promote opportunities in the German science system, and pursue science diplomacy partnership with the Government of India. AI cooperation is a priority field in bilateral cooperation, as highlighted in the 2019 Government Consultations between PM Modi and Chancellor Merkel. (https://india.diplo.de/in-en/themen/weitere-themen )
The German Embassy works in close cooperation with the other German missions in Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, and Mumbai (https://india.diplo.de/in-en/vertretungen ), which each pursue own ambitious programmes to support bilateral AI cooperation in their respective jurisdictions, together with partners from industry, research, and higher education.
Furthermore, the German Centre for Research and Innovation New Delhi (DWIH) serves as an umbrella for the numerous German scientific institutes that have a representation in India. It is the go-to platform for all queries related to research and innovation collaboration with Germany. With AI as its Focus topic 2019-20, it has hosted numerous high-level panel discussions on AI opportunities, and regularly informs on new trends and opportunity in bilateral AI research cooperation (https://www.dwih-newdelhi.org/en/topics/artificial-intelligence/ )
Chief Scientist, IBMS Labs
Narayana Nethralaya Foundation, Bangalore
At Narayana Nethralaya Foundation, we are involved in novel R&D activities for improved diagnosis of ocular disease and their management using advanced imaging technologies and software processing. We are involved in design and construction of advanced optical coherence tomography imaging devices for functional characterisation of ocular tissues in disease. The characterisation is complimented with our in-house image processing, analytics and AI/ML development. Out R&D is sponsored by both government and private organisations. We have filed multiple invention disclosures and two among them have been recently awarded USA patents.
Scientist TCS Research and Innovation Gurgaon
Dr. Amit Sangroya is a Scientist at TCS Innovation Labs in Delhi, India. His current research interests are in the area of trustworthy AI systems. One of the important parameters to ensure trust is explainability. Amit has explored the state of art techniques in explainability and proposed a novel approach combining data and proxy models based techniques. Presently, his focus is to investigate the explainability approach in the area of healthcare.
Overall, he has published over 20 research papers in the areas of distributed systems, software engineering, AI and NLP. Before joining TCS, Dr. Sangroya received PhD in Computer Science from University of Grenoble, France in 2014 and MS (By research) degree from IIIT Hyderabad, India in 2010.
Professor
BITS, Goa
Ashwin is the Class of 1981 Chair Professor at BITS Pilani, Goa. He received his Ph.D. in 1991 from the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of New South Wales. in 1991. Ashwin joined the ILP group at the Turing Institute, Scotland and---with S. Muggleton (now at Imperial College, London)--- worked on the development and application of Inductive Logic Programming.. From 1993--2003, Ashwin was at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory as a Research Fellow and then University Lecturer. At Oxford he was involved in pioneering applications of ILP systems to di_cult real-world problems in molecular biology and chemistry. In 2003, he moved to the IBM Research – India, as a Research Sta_ Member. In 2009, he was awarded a Ramanujan Fellowship by the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India. In 2010, he took up the post of Professor at the newly formed South Asian University, and became the founder Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science. He was Professor of Computer Science at the IIIT-D from 2012, and moved in Jan 2015 to BITS-Pilani, Goa as Chair Professor. Since 2020, he has been the Head of the Anuradha and Prashant Palakurthi Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (APPCAIR) at BITS.
Vice President - AI & Data Science
Cropin
Praveen is the VP Data Science & AI at Cropin and Visiting faculty at AMMACHI Labs, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetam. He graduated with his Ph.D. (Summa cum Laude) in Control, Signal and Image Processing from INRIA, France. His research work, in the past decade, has spanned to the application of Machine Learning to Energy & Utility, Healthcare, Cognitive Sciences, Life Sciences and Agriculture. He practices organic farming in his farm and is a certified Heartfulness Meditation trainer.
Intelligent Systems Group
CSIR - Central Electronics Engineering Research Institute
(CSIR-CEERI), Pilani
CEO, Applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Centre (INAI) & Intel India
varma.s.konala@intel.com, varma.konala@iiit.ac.in
AI has changed, over the last 3-4 years from a potential technology to a capability of national importance across the world. Adoption till date has been driven primarily from commercial perspective with the first demonstration of applications in the consumer Internet space.
The real power of AI, though, lies in its transformative potential to address population scale challenges and provides a global leadership opportunity for India in creating human-centric, foundational technologies and digital infrastructure that reimagines implementation and delivery in 21st century.
The need of the hour is for Industry, government, academia and the public to work together to support development of the AI based solutions that can have a meaningful impact on the society.
INAI is an initiative to apply AI to population scale problems in the Indian context, combining research and translation.
This collaborative effort, championed by Intel and catalyzed by the Government of Telangana, is anchored at IIIT Hyderabad. INAI will leverage the academic expertise in AI at KCIS, the broader computing strengths of IIIT-H, the framework and activities of iHub-Data.
Healthcare & Smart Mobility are the current focus domains.
Director of India Office
German Research Foundation (Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) India Office
The German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) is the self-governing body of the research community in Germany. As such, it is also a research funding agency. With an annual budget of over 3 billion Euro, it is Europe’s largest funding agency for fundamental research.
DFG India Office in Delhi was established in November 2006. It is one of DFG’s six liaison offices throughout the world. DFG India Office fosters Indo-German collaboration, the mobility of researchers, and the internationalisation of German universities. It does so chiefly by establishing joint Indo-German funding opportunities together with its partner agencies such as DST, DBT or INSA, and by dispensing information on its funding programmes to Indian and German researchers.
Head – International BD & Strategy
Planys Technologies
Ageing infrastructure is a pressing global issue. Underwater structures need to be inspected regularly to sidestep unforeseen disasters like bridge collapses, dam bursts, etc. Presently, human divers are used for routine inspections. However, these come with a set of drawbacks like human limitations, hazardous conditions, inaccurate post-inspection data analysis, and non-digital reporting.
Planys is a deep tech marine robotics startup that is changing the paradigm for Underwater inspection across the world. We envision to steer a new course in the maintenance and inspection industry with its disruptive innovations in the field of marine robotics and novel underwater NDT methods that are unique in the world. The data collected by Planys is put into an AI-enabled reporting platform where the AI has been indigenously designed to auto identify anomalies on the structures like Ports, Dams, Bridges, O&G, etc.
We are now working towards implementation of this technologies with the Coast guard, Environmental research groups, Wet Infrastructure (Dams, Bridges, Porta), Offshore energy, etc.
Cropin
Creating Coordination Protocols under incomplete information and applying it to Energy Efficient 5G communications, Smart-Grids, Optimal Control and UAV communication network. More recent work includes creation of District-wise Covid Database for India during the first wave. My current interests are using Remote Sensing for Agricultural Applications. More specifically, I am working on building tools for the challenging task of Crop Identification.
