-- Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru -- Sciences and Social sciences are often considered apart but Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Professor of Computer Science at IIIT-Hyderabad and Associate Researcher at Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and AI, believes that technology has so much to offer to social sciences. Therefore, Prof. Kumaraguru is carrying out research in an emerging area called Computational Social Sciences. To know more about his research in this field, Prof.

-- Dr. Sunandan Chakraborty -- The web is a sea of information where the much-needed information may just seem a click away! However, mining exhaustive information from the web is not a trivial and straightforward task as it looks to be. Therefore, AI researchers are developing natural language processing models to mine relevant information from the web. One such researcher is Dr. Sunandan Chakraborty, Assistant Professor at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University.

-- Dr. Vijay Tiwari -- The Brain- a three-pound of flesh that resides in the skull- is undoubtedly the most complex thing of all objects in the universe. This complexity poses challenges to study the underlying mechanisms responsible for causing brain disorders. If applied well, the functional genomics toolbox can help in discerning the workings of this mysterious organ along with deciphering the genetic basis of brain disorders. Prof.

--Dr. Gugan Thoppe-- Reinforcement learning is a type of machine learning technique where the agent learns from the interactive environment by trial and error and has applications in sectors such as self-driving cars, marketing, robotics, gaming, manufacturing etc. However, at times it is difficult to apply reinforcement learning in situations where objective function features such as linearity, convexity or differentiability often are non-existent or difficult to detect. This is where Evolutionary strategy RL can help.

--Dr. V.S. Subrahmanian-- Digitization has indeed made the world more connected! However, this connection comes together with the threat of public exposure and misuse of confidential and private information. India is also grappling with this threat and was one of the top three nations in Asia worst affected by the cyberattacks in the year 2021. The problem however isn’t restricted to India but is a challenge for countries across the globe.

--Dr. Balaji Vasan Srinivasan-- In today’s digital world, social media and websites have become an important tool for communication. As digital communication is becoming more and more important, companies are looking forward to increase their user engagement to advertise their products, agenda or to just spread knowledge. One of the ways to increase user engagement is to provide them with multimodal content which is a combination of two or more modes of communication such as text, image, video, audio etc.

--Prof. Srinivasan Parthasarathy-- A graph, which consists of nodes and edges, is a pictorial representation of the relationship between various objects. Analysis of graphs can help in inferring social, biological, road, finance and other networks as well. Prof. Srinivasan Parthasarathy who is Professor at Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering and Department of Biomedical Informatics at the Ohio State University and RBCDSAI Distinguished Fellow gave a talk on his research in the area of graph analysis through a talk titled “Scaling graph representation learning algorithms in an implementation agnostic fashion” which was organized as a part of Sixth RBCDSAI Latent View Colloquium on 23rd March 2022.

--Prof. Ramkrishna Pasumarthy-- The brain has undeniably been the most enigmatic organ of the human body. To further our understanding of this mysterious organ, a talk titled “Controllability of Functional Brain Networks” was organized on 2nd September 2021 as a part of the third AI impact seminar. The talk was delivered by Professor Ramkrishna Pasumarthy who is an Associate Professor at IIT Madras. Prof. Pasumarthy started the talk by saying that for a long time most brain modelling was questionnaire-based and only now the availability of huge amounts of FMRI data is driving advances in this field.

--Prof. Cynthia Rudin-- For quite a long time, researchers and the public were thrilled by the wonders of machine learning. However, over the period of time, the community realized that the machine learning models aren’t a magic wand and they are as best as the data provided to them during the training and development stage. As the world started making decisions based on AI, there were soon conflicts between human and machine intelligence and therefore the need for explainability of black-box models become apparent.

--Dr.Peter Stone-- Robot locomotion continues to remain a challenging problem in spite of the advances in the field. To gain more insights on the topic, a talk on “Machine Learning for Robot Locomotion: Grounded Learning and Adaptive Parameter Learning” was organized as a part of the fourth latent colloquium on 30th September 2021. The talk was delivered by Prof. Peter Stone, who is the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor and Associate Chair of Computer Science, as well as Director of Texas Robotics, at the University of Texas at Austin.

--Prof. M. Vidyasagar, FRS-- COVID-19 pandemic is testing times for entire humanity and hopes are on science to provide predictions and solutions to wade through and curb this pandemic. Scientists across the world have joined forces and are trying to answer a variety of questions regarding the COVID-19 infection such as how does the infection spread?, how does the virus infect human cells? How can we stop the infection spread?

--Dr. Yana Bromberg-- With high throughput sequencing technologies available, we can sequence a large number of genomes now and look at the variations in DNA sequences between various organisms and in a population. But how do we identify whether the changes in DNA sequence between two organisms do translate to functional changes or have no effect? This question was taken up for the Eighth IBSE Colloquium talk which was co-organized by RBCDSAI.

--Sudarsun Santhiappan Jeshuren Chelladurai-- Medical coding (codifying the medical records) has essentially remained a human powered job since its inception. BUDDI.AI aims to change that by partially automating the process using AI technology. To know more about BUDDI.AI, a talk on “AI Powered Automatic Medical Coding of Electronic Health Records'' was organized as a part of second RBCDSAI AImpact Seminar on 12th August 2021. The talk was delivered by Sudarsun Santhiappan (Co-founder of BUDDI.

--Dr. Ramanathan Guha-- A famous mathematician and a data scientist enthusiast, Clive Humby, once said that “Data is the new oil”. Indeed, data is valuable and an untapped resource! However, most of the data currently is in its raw format and can only become valuable once it is cleaned to be used for creating insights. To know how Data Commons is trying to achieve this aim, Dr. Ramanathan Guha, who is a Google Fellow, Vice President at Google and also leading the Data Commons project, was invited to deliver the third RBCDSAI Latent View Colloquium talk on “Data Commons (The open knowledge Repository)” on 21st July 2021.

Sparks flew when friends, Prof. Sriraam Natarajan, UT Dallas and Prof. Kristian Kersting, TU Darmstadt decided to get together over a cup of coffee and discuss on the topic “Symbolic or Deep Learning? Promising directions of AI”. The talk started with setting up the stage with “AI is changing the world and has a huge impact in economics, drug development, agriculture etc.” Kristian believes that AI should be an engine for innovation.

Ethics in AI is one of the most discussed topics in recent times. Read about the fireside chat with Prof. Srinivasan Parthasarathy where he spoke about AI, Data Science, and Ethics. Get to know the various challenges and solutions embraced by different service providers to keep their clients safe and happy.