Opening Keynote

Gururaj "Desh" Deshpande is a Trustee of Deshpande Foundation along with his wife Jaishree. Desh is the President and Chairman of Sparta Group LLC, a family investment office. Dr. Deshpande has pursued an entrepreneurial career for the last three decades. He was involved either as the founder, a founding investor or chairman of several companies including Cascade Communications, Sycamore Networks, Coral Networks, Tejas Networks, Cimaron, Webdialogs, Airvana, Sandstone Capital, A123 Systems and Curata. Dr. Deshpande lives in Boston and serves as a life-member of the MIT Corporation, and his support has made possible MIT's Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation. The Deshpande Foundation strengthens ecosystems that create significant social and economic impact through entrepreneurship and innovation. Leveraging the experience gained at the MIT Center, the Deshpande Foundation has facilitated the setup of five other centers; Deshpande Center for Social Entrepreneurship in India, Entrepreneurship for ALL (EforALL), the Pond-Deshpande Center at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, the Dunin Deshpande Queens Innovation Center at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario and the Gopalakrishnan Deshpande Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India. Deshpande Foundation also provided the founding grant for MassChallenge in Boston, National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-CorpsTM) and Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) . Dr. Deshpande holds a B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology - Madras, an M.E. from the University of New Brunswick in Canada, and Ph.D. from Queens University in Canada. Deshpande co-chaired the National Council to support President Obama's innovation and entrepreneurship strategy from 2010 to 2015.

Milind Tambe is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Director of Center for Research in Computation and Society at Harvard University; concurrently, he is also Director "AI for Social Good" at Google Research India. Prof. Tambe's work focuses on advancing AI and multiagent systems for public health, conservation & public safety, with a track record of building pioneering AI systems for social impact. He is recipient of the IJCAI (International Joint Conference on AI) John McCarthy Award, AAMAS ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Autonomous Agents Research Award, AAAI (Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award, and he is a fellow of AAAI and ACM. He is also a recipient of the INFORMS Wagner prize for excellence in Operations Research practice and Rist Prize from MORS (Military Operations Research Society). For his work on AI and public safety, he has received Columbus Fellowship Foundation Homeland security award and commendations and certificates of appreciation from the US Coast Guard, the Federal Air Marshals Service and airport police at the city of Los Angeles. Prof. Tambe has contributed several foundational papers in AI, in particular in multiagent systems, for which he has received or been nominated for best paper awards over 25 times at top AI conferences. Prof. Tambe completed his PhD from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and his undergraduate education at BITS, Pilani, India.

Shubo Biswas started his career in the Automotive Industry in Michigan, USA about three decades ago. He joined Dassault Systems where he worked on developing cutting edge dynamic scheduling software under an NSF Grant and built up the Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) software stack and its services practice. He was one of the pioneer engineers who lead the transformation of the US manufacturing industry from paper based work instructions to fully digital 3D graphical model based interactive work instructions. This technology was adopted by Boeing for it's Defense and Commercial Airplane programs. Shubo moved to Seattle in 2006 to lead the Production Operations software team at Boeing in charge of manufacturing their latest airplane - the 787 Dreamliner. He helped develop the Global Production System supporting Boeing's globally distributed manufacturing ecosystem. Subsequently, he took on the role of Chief Architect - Manufacturing Execution Systems and then Chief Architect- Factory Automation and Robotics supporting the integration of billions of dollars worth of Robotics and Automation hardware into Boeing Production facilities. Shubo was hired by Google Inc. at their Mountain View campus in 2016 to lead the integration of Robotics and Automation into Data Center operations. While at Google, Shubo started volunteering with various NGOs in India like Paani Foundation (founded by Aamir Khan and Kiran Rao). He hosted a "Talks at Google"; event with the Paani team while contributing substantial volunteer hours performing "Shramadaan"; building watershed structures in remote villages in Satara, Maharashtra. Shubo left Google in 2020 to launch his own startup GreenGood Labs, LLC focusing on self-help digital tools for rural transformation projects in areas like water, climate, soil, agriculture, agroforestry. He joined Deshpande Foundation as the Global CTO in 2020 where he leads technology initiatives combining the latest in the areas of AI/ML, Remote Sensing, Multi-band Satellite Imagery, Cloud Computing, IoT and Drone based imagery with ancient wisdom sciences in the areas of Regenerative agriculture, Natural Farming and Soil Health restoration. Shubo has a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from India and a Master of Applied Science degree in Manufacturing and Industrial Systems Engineering from Canada.