The use of AI for environment and social causes is proven to be effective not only saving time but mapping the issues correctly to understand them and generate solutions.
Data scientists do this using machine learning and robotics. One such individual from India is Chirantan Ghosh. While pursuing his Masters, the US govt funded his work through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The farmers were facing a problem of Surface Runoff. Surface runoff occurs as a result of nutrients being washed away into bodies of water by heavy precipitation. It has a negative impact on both the economy and the environment. It also pollutes the water, causing harmful algal blooms and hypoxia in the water bodies of the Great Lakes region. Thus, the alerting system is critical to preventing water pollution by reducing farmers’ effort, cost, and time.
The existing system of NOAA was not up to the mark. Chirantan’s research was to improve the performance, utilising a machine learning algorithm for runoff and risk level prediction of surface runoff.
Chirantan's expertise and curiosity led him to work for a year on another research project funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the United States' government. He used deep learning-based multi-segmentation to segment small RNA cells in this project. This contributes to the process's automation, which reduces the complexity of manually segmenting the cell wall by minimising errors and time.
Chirantan has also ventured into mainstream business as a private player by starting camia.us. Like Google Lens, the latter aims to solve any object detection or identification problem with greater accuracy and on any camera-equipped device. It can recognise any object and provide detailed information to anyone who wants to learn more about it. It can also recommend similar items. The object category will determine the type of information it provides. For example, if it's a dish, it will not only provide its name or content, but it will also recommend nearby locations where it can be found, as well as any available reviews.
Hap.ai is another venture of Chirantan addressing the issues of women. His concern for society and women’s safety has led him to consider establishing a new organisation called hap.ai. It will detect and identify any threat using computer vision and deep learning-based surveillance methods, alerting the appropriate organisation and the subject in question. It will help to overcome the majority of the challenges and security concerns that women face, while also promoting a safe and healthy society. It will provide a safe environment for women on a college or university campus, as well as in the workplace. The surveillance camera will be used to recognise and track people, recognise their actions, and detect a potential threat. It will monitor a person’s behaviour and send an alert if anything unusual is discovered.
All of this research has inspired him to continue his studies in computer vision and deep learning as a Ph.D. student at Lehigh University beginning in the Fall of 2022. Chirantan will return to Lehigh to conduct societally beneficial research. One of his potential research projects will be to identify fake news among the abundance of online news available in the form of videos or images. This will help to prevent or control the spread of misinformation on the internet, as well as to mitigate any damage caused by it. He will also work on facial analytics for humans and animals.
