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In episode 43 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Varun Ganapathi.
Varun is co-founder and CTO at AKASA, a company developing AI systems for healthcare operations. Varun’s previous entrepreneurial experience includes co-founding Numovis, a company focused on motion tracking and computer vision for user interaction that was acquired by Google, and Terminal.com, a browser-based IDE acquired by Udacity. Varun received his PhD from Stanford in 2014.
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Outline:
(00:00) Intro
(1:50) Varun’s intro to AI
(3:25) Working with Andrew Ng
(7:37) Varun’s road to a PhD
(13:20) Numovis, Google acquisition
(15:00) Vacillating between research and entrepreneurship, Terminal.com
(17:10) Roots of Varun’s interest in AI + healthcare
(22:30) Research at AKASA, Deep Claim
(25:45) Causality in claim denial, expert knowledge
(25:52) we need to trademark the word “gradient”
(28:20) AKASA’s Unified Automation, expert-in-the-loop
(34:15) Varun’s near-term and long-term visions for AKASA
(39:50) Towards “deploying a new version of healthcare”
(42:25) Varun’s perspective on the role of AI in healthcare, the need for humans in the loop
(47:02) Varun’s advice for aspiring AI researchers and practitioners
(51:00) Outro
Links:
Varun Ganapathi: AKASA, AI and Healthcare