Whitepaper
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Director, Solvesustain
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Founder & Executive Director, Shelter Associates
“Accurate data is the lifeblood of good policies and decision making”
As nations and organisations strive to solve social problems around the world, the lack of accurate data has often been cited as a primary reason why policies do not translate into effective on-ground solutions. The reality in urban informal settlements is no different. They manifest multidimensional deprivation, characterised by a lack of secure tenure, inaccessibility, and inadequate sanitation and health services which marginalises the slum dwellers. Governments and NGOs also find it extremely difficult to effectively target vulnerable communities due to the lack of reliable data. Data on slum settlements is crucial for the inclusion of these underserved communities in city level development plans.
Realising the dire need for safe and hygienic sanitation facilities and practices, Pratima started leveraging data and technology since the late 90s when she realised that data with the Urban Local Bodies was inconclusive and disjointed with the on-ground reality. This propelled the need for a data system that would provide unfailing results. A year of continuous efforts and iterations resulted in a well-tailored Geographical Information System (GIS). It catered to the needs of slum mapping, and spatial layout formation. It also helped to link the socio-economic surveys taken to individual dwellings/house structures that were mapped on GIS. Our granular spatial data harnesses the power of geo-visualisation for effective planning and monitoring of our Sanitation, Housing and Covid-relief projects.
The communities form the backbone of Shelter Associates’ data-driven approach, as they are involved in conducting survey, creating awareness and making sure the data sets are inclusive. This spatial data is then shared with the respective Urban Local Bodies for validation. Once the process is complete, the data is made public on our website while it is also linked to the ULB’s website making it freely available for all to use.
The co-created data helps immensely in bridging the information gap. SA gives slum-dwellers a voice by arming them with data about their community, empowering them to make decisions making them partners in the developmental process.
Chairperson, Arghyam
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Founder & Trustee, Oorvani Foundation
OpenCity.in is a leading urban data platform that democratises city data across India by enhancing transparency, fostering understanding and facilitating civic engagement. Alongside hosting an urban open data repository, we work to build a strong open data community.
OpenCity collaborative events or “jams” enable citizens to participate in finding solutions to urban issues; they serve as an effective tool for public problem solving. These events bring together participants from diverse and multidisciplinary backgrounds to open up data, analyse it, and derive actionable insights. From water management to urban mobility, our crowdsourcing projects, datajams, hackathons, and solution jams, have become instrumental in breaking down data silos, revealing patterns, and constructing “what-if” scenarios to propose innovative solutions to pressing public issues.
Through these initiatives, OpenCity provides opportunities for the public to engage with urban issues, which can lead to actionable insights and potential solutions. Our approach brings the power of collective intelligence to drive civic action for better cities.
Chair & Professor, Isaac, Centre for Public Health, IISc
Research Professor, CiSTUP, IISc
CTO, Elena Geo Systems Pvt Ltd
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Director, Centre for Brain Research, IISc, Bangalore
The talk will present details of two longitudinal cohort studies in the context of ageing brain research. One study is in the urban area and the other in a rural area. The challenges of sustaining a large cohort of several thousand participants over several years along with the handling of large data that is generated from such studies will be presented.
The workshop on Healthcare Knowledge Graphs and Analytics will explore how data modelling for healthcare, and NLP techniques can revolutionise healthcare by standardising data and analytics paving the way to building comprehensive knowledge graphs with ability for semantic reasoning and machine interpretable data and machine automatable algorithms. Participants will gain insights into the development and application of knowledge graphs in healthcare settings, focusing on real-world case studies and cutting-edge research.
The Introduction to MLOps in the GenAI Age workshop will provide an end-to-end demonstration of MLOps workflows, covering ETL and analytics. Attendees will engage in hands-on activities, developing ETL blocks to extract data from IUDX, storing it in ML-compliant formats, and processing it at scale using MLOps on Kubernetes. The session will include a 30-minute overview of MLOps architectures followed by a 1-hour code-heavy tutorial, ensuring participants gain practical experience in implementing these workflows.
The workshop on Harnessing the Power of Remote Sensing Data will delve into the transformative potential of remote sensing technologies in various sectors, including environmental monitoring, urban planning, and disaster management. Participants will explore techniques for data acquisition, processing, and analysis, gaining hands-on experience with tools that enable precise, large-scale observations of the Earth’s surface. This session will provide valuable insights into how remote sensing data can be effectively utilised to drive informed decision-making and innovation.
This workshop will introduce participants to a pivotal geospatial data exchange platform that supports the National Geospatial Policy (NGP 2022). Attendees will explore the platform’s capabilities, including data exploration, user-consumer interactions, and analytics. This hands-on session is essential for anyone involved in geospatial data, offering practical insights into how to build innovative applications using the geospatial data exchange.
The workshop on Demos on Secure Data Handling Using Privacy Enhancing Technologies will showcase practical demonstrations of cutting-edge privacy-enhancing technologies, including Differential Privacy, Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and Secure Multiparty Computation (SMPC). Participants will gain practical insights into how these technologies can be integrated into industry solutions and government systems, enabling secure collaboration and innovation while adhering to regulatory requirements. This session is ideal for those looking to explore new applications in the area of secure computing and privacy-preserving data analysis.
The Young Researchers’ Forum on Data and AI for Public Good will feature engaging poster sessions from early-career researchers, including Postdocs, PhD students, and Master’s by Research candidates. This symposium provides a platform for emerging scholars to showcase their innovative research on leveraging data and AI to address public good challenges, fostering discussions and networking opportunities with peers and experts in the field.
The IUDX Dashboards and Sandboxes workshop will highlight the transformative potential of the India Urban Data Exchange platform, deployed in over 50 cities across India. This session will demonstrate how IUDX can be leveraged to create data-driven dashboards for city governance, focusing on impactful use cases in traffic management, solid waste management, and green corridor management, integrating data analytics and geospatial technologies.
The Education and Training for Responsible AI will have leading educators and practitioners from industry and academia to examine how teaching and training occurs in this fast moving space, and how flexible, life-long learning is inculcated in alignment with the National Education Policy (NEP). This will cover both degree-based training universities, certifications through edtech companies, and internal training imparted by the learning teams within companies. The unique needs of training on data and AI for public good will be explored.
Road Safety Ambassador, International Road Federation Advisor, Project India Road Safety 2.0, WEF
Chief Program Officer – National Urban Digital Mission
Director, Engineering & Growth, Namma Yatri
Executive Officer, Head Powertrain & xEV Engineering Maruti Suzuki India Limited
National Program Director – Ease of Doing Business, Project Director – NHEV, President – CPOs of India, & Ex-CAG Member
Sr. Operations Officer, World Bank Health Systems
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Director, ICMR-NCDIR
Founder & Director, Data For India
Senior Director, MeitY
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CEO, Health System Transformation Platform
Deputy Surveyor General, NIGST, SOI, Hyderabad
Technical Lead, Analytics Systems, CDPG
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Engineering Director, CDPG
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Principal Scientist & Program Manager, CDPG
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Associate Professor, IISc
Digital interfaces and communications have become critical for access to information, entertainment, economic opportunities and even essential services such as healthcare. Speech is the most natural form of communication, and most Indians are not digital natives comfortable with typing or English. We need spoken language interfaces that work for all variations and dialects. But such data barely exists. IISc-ARTPARK’s umbrella of open-source speech data initiatives are capturing the true diversity of India’s spoken languages to propel language AI technologies and content for an inclusive digital India, in collaboration with Bhashini, MEITY.
Engineering Director, CDPG
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CEO, ARTPARK, IISc
High-quality data is the key to realizing the promise of AI in healthcare. ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research), IISc and ARTPARK are building MIDAS India, a national system for gold standard datasets to enable research, validation and deployment of AI-based solutions. It is a DPI (digital public infrastructure)-enabled, thematic hubs-and-spokes system through which purpose-appropriate datasets that reflect the diversity of India’s population, settings and needs can be collected, curated and made available. The effort has been kicked off in collaboration with AIIMS New Delhi and several other institutions across the country, starting with Oral Cancer screening.
Head of Engineering, Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP)
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The invited talks session on Geospatial Data Applications: Perspectives from Practitioners will offer insights from industry experts on the practical applications of geospatial data in various sectors. Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of how geospatial technologies are being leveraged for real-world problem-solving, from urban planning to environmental management. In addition, the practitioners will speak on the challenges they speak and how a geospatial data exchange can help in accessing the data and shorten the product development cycle.
It is well established that if properly harnessed, data has the power to transform societies. However, in practice, the pathway to achieving societal impact is not so straightforward. This session focuses on the challenges that are typically faced in the journey of utilising data to realise positive change. There will be talks by experts who have a long experience in this field, and they will describe some of the best practices and the lessons learned.
Data collection is the first step and is also one of the hardest challenges in realising the potential of data for public good. Often, the required data is not easily available, it is incomplete or erroneous, the formats are not standardised, and the sources are disparate. In many cases, some special tools need to be developed for the purpose of data collection, especially in situations where connectivity is poor. In addition, issues related to data privacy, security, and governance need to be addressed before the data can be shared for building useful applications. This session will focus on some recent large data collection efforts and address some of the privacy governance issues.
CEO, Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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General Manager, Strategic Accounts, Invas Technologies (P) Ltd.
SMARTKHETI is a One M2M based integrated platform designed to revolutionise modern farming by providing farmers with comprehensive tools for automation, real-time visibility, and market access. This proposal outlines a cutting-edge system that combines Internet of Things (IoT) technology with web-based applications to offer farmers advanced capabilities, including farm automation, real-time crop monitoring, weather updates, government alerts, market pricing, and equipment rental services. Smart Kheti is certified by ICAR, Delhi
CTO, Genesys International Corporation Ltd
The advent of 3D urban spatial Digital Twins marks a significant milestone in the management of modern cities. This presentation will delve into the transformative potential of these technologies, particularly in the context of India’s National Geospatial Policy 2022. By exploring how Genesys’ content program is spearheading the creation of detailed, city-centric datasets, the talk will highlight the practical applications of these Digital Twins. These datasets not only enhance urban planning and infrastructure management but also foster a new paradigm in how cities are monitored, maintained and developed. Attendees will gain insights into the critical role geospatial data plays in shaping smarter, more resilient urban environments for the future.
Founder and CEO, Garudalytics
This presentation will focus on the application of GeoAI technologies in agriculture and how available data can be utilised to drive innovation and efficiency in farming practices. Emphasising the capabilities of Garudalytics’ smart mapping and AI solutions, we will explore how these tools enhance agricultural decision-making through advanced spatial analysis and predictive modelling. The discussion will include real-world examples where GeoAI has improved crop monitoring, yield prediction, resource management, and overall yield optimization. We will also address the practical challenges of integrating GeoAI into existing agricultural systems and offer strategies for maximising its benefits. Additionally, the talk will cover how GeoAI can leverage both structured and unstructured datasets to enhance agricultural outcomes, with a focus on Garudalytics’ Agri AI solution for integrating diverse datasets, including in-situ data.
Deputy Director & Chief of Operations, CPDTRI Laboratory Director, ADRC PI, Molecular Immunology, Mazumdar Shaw Medical Foundation (MSMF) Director, Beyond Antibody LLP
Till the late 20th century healthcare has been the forte of biology evading the clutches of mathematics. The new millennium digitised life and sciences therein leading to data-explosion. How digitization and data is propelling healthcare for public good will be discussed with specific examples from the world of diagnostics and therapeutics.
CTO, CDPG
As organisations increasingly rely on data-driven insights to fuel innovation, collaboration and decision-making, the need to process sensitive data, such as data containing PII, confidential business information etc., securely has become more critical than ever. Further, the organisations are increasingly tasked with balancing the utility of data with the need to protect individual privacy. Traditional methods of data protection and data anonymization often fall short, especially when computations are performed on datasets containing sensitive information. Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) offer a transformative technological approach, enabling secure computation and further, enabling balancing privacy and utility while working with the underlying data.
This talk will explore the integration of PETs into computational processes involving sensitive and private data, and securing data in its different states: at rest, in transit, in-use and post-use. We will discuss the role of foundational PETs such as Confidential computation with hardware based Secure Enclaves, secure multi-party computation, homomorphic encryption, and federated learning, examining how these technologies protect data across its lifecycle, ensuring that sensitive information remains secure whether it is stored, transmitted, actively processed or released after undergoing some aggregation transformation. We will also discuss implementation, performance and deployment issues concerning PETs. We will present different use cases where secure computation is paramount and PETs become a key enabler. Overall the talk will provide a good overview on how PETs can be effectively incorporated into computational workflows to enhance data privacy across all stages and provide some actionable insights on leveraging PETs to securely manage and compute sensitive data in your organization.
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CEO, DeepMatrix
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Executive Program Director, Sustainable Cities & Director, WRI India Ross Centers
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The Hackathon Finale will bring together the brightest minds who have been competing to develop cutting-edge solutions for the urban mobility problem in Bengaluru. During this session, the top teams will present their innovative projects, demonstrating how they’ve created solutions to given problem statements of the hackathon. Judges will evaluate the solutions based on the accuracy of the results, novelty, and feasibility, leading to the announcement of the winning teams. Join us for an inspiring showcase of innovation and a glimpse into the future of tech-driven problem-solving.
Program Director – Ease of Doing Business, Project Director- NHEV, President – CPOS India, Director DIISHA
The panel discussion on “Roadblocks to Achieving Sustainable Mobility” will explore the critical challenges hindering the transition to sustainable transportation systems. Experts from various sectors will examine barriers such as inadequate infrastructure, policy gaps, technological limitations, and societal resistance. The discussion will also focus on innovative solutions and collaborative approaches needed to overcome these obstacles, ensuring a more sustainable and equitable mobility future for all.