It is estimated that over 2.5 billion people live on under $2.5 per day, this number increases to 4.5 billion people who live on less than $8 per day. These underserved communities constitute the "base of the pyramid" and face unique and extreme challenges in accessing basic services such as healthcare, education, employment, and other essential infrastructure. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals is a global effort to help solve these challenges. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science have the potential to play a game-changing role in creating positive social impact and achieving global goals for underserved communities. However, building AI solutions for these problems throws up unique challenges. Building such solutions require innovative thinking, strong technical knowledge, deep understanding of the user and appropriate infrastructure to build the products. The Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Wadhwani AI) is an independent non-profit applied research institute that develops and deploys AI solutions to solve complex societal challenges. Over the past few years, Wadhwani AI has built AI solutions for challenges faced by the developing world at large in the domains of healthcare and agriculture. They are winners of the Google AI Impact challenge 2019 and their Chief Innovation Officer, Dr. Rahul Panicker is here to deliver a talk on the "AI lessons learned" from their work, and to talk about opportunities and research areas for AI in global development.

Dr. Rahul Panicker is the Chief Innovation Officer at the Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He is an MIT TR35 awardee, World Economic Forum Social Entrepreneur of the Year, Industrial Design Society of America Gold winner, and an Echoing Green Fellow. He holds an MS/PhD in EE from Stanford University, is an alumnus of the Stanford d.school, and has a B.Tech from IIT Madras.