Danish Pruthi, Assistant Professor at the Department of Computational and Data Sciences (CDS), IISc, has been selected as an AI2050 Early Career Fellow, announced by Schmidt Sciences.
He joins the second cohort of 19 AI2050 Early Career Fellows who will pursue bold and multidisciplinary research in artificial intelligence (AI) for societal benefit across four countries, six disciplines, and 17 institutions. He is the only Fellow selected from India.
The AI2050 Early Career Fellows are a part of the Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Computing Institute at Schmidt Sciences, which supports fundamental research in AI, the application of AI and data science across a wide variety of disciplines, and the creation of high-impact research platforms that can speed up discovery.
Conceived and co-chaired by Eric Schmidt and James Manyika, AI2050 advances Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s $125 million commitment over five years to identify and support talented individuals seeking solutions to ensure society benefits from AI. The AI2050 Early Career Fellowship encourages young researchers to pursue bold and ambitious work on difficult challenges as well as promising opportunities in AI, which often involves research that is multidisciplinary, risky, and hard to fund through traditional means. About 15-20 early career researchers around the world are selected annually through a rigorous process. Early Career Fellows receive an award to support a two-year project as well as non-monetary support, such as connections to stakeholders to help them amplify impact.
Within their research, each fellow will contend with the central motivating question of AI2050: “It’s 2050. AI has turned out to be hugely beneficial to society. What happened? What are the most important problems we solved and the opportunities and possibilities we realised to ensure this outcome?”
Danish Pruthi’s AI2050 project will attempt to characterise and improve the geographical representativeness of AI models. For AI systems to be broadly useful, it is important that they are geographically inclusive, that is, they encode information about different cultures and countries around the globe. Current AI models inordinately capture information about certain dominant groups and erase information about others. This research, if successful, would lead to AI models that can produce just as realistic pictures of houses in India as they do for houses in the USA, and accurately answer questions about Atal Bihari Vajpayee as they do about Barack Obama.
More details at:
https://www.schmidtsciences.org/ai2050-early-career-fellows-2024/
https://ai2050.schmidtsciences.org/fellow/danish-pruthi/
https://ai2050.schmidtsciences.org/fellows/
About Schmidt Sciences:
Schmidt Sciences is a philanthropy dedicated to fostering the advancements of science and technology that accelerate and deepen our understanding of the natural world and develop solutions to global issues. To learn more, please visit SchmidtSciences.org.
About AI2050:
AI2050 is an initiative of Schmidt Sciences, conceived and co-chaired by Eric Schmidt and James Manyika that aims to support exceptional people working on key opportunities and hard problems that are critical to get right for society to benefit from AI. To learn more about the AI2050 initiative, visit: https://ai2050.schmidtsciences.org/
