Dr. Chitra Dorai is a globally renowned AI Scientist and the Founder & CEO of Amicus Brain Innovations focused on bringing the power of AI to tackle some of the important societal problems in healthcare and financial services. Dr. Dorai, known as a “Force for Good” coined the term “ARTful AI”, to advance artificial intelligence (AI) research and practice with Accountability, Responsibility and Transparency for the benefit of humanity.  

 

Chitra’s passion is mentoring and coaching for the development, health and vitality of the technical community around the globe.  She works in many areas to help promote up and coming technical talent and mentors students from high school to universities across the globe each year.  She gives back on a sustained basis by leading, organizing, and teaming in diversity initiatives with nonprofit organizations such as NAWRB, SheTek, WIT conferences, E-Week events; through mentoring colleagues as well as graduate students at universities; and participating and contributing to task forces and work groups. Her focus in recent years has also turned to nurturing Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) interest in school years, and contributes her time increasingly to programs geared towards a wide group of students from elementary school to high school years.  

 

When she was at IBM, she  served as a Co-Advisor for 5 Ph.D. students and was active on University Advisory Boards (Industrial Advisory Board of Univ. of Illinois, Urbana Champaign and Univ. of Mysore in India). She gives back to the local community year after year with participation in E-Week events (annual volunteer with school visits and technology camps since 2005); nurturing STEM interest in middle school students (Mentor at P-Tech schools of IBM and Teacher at Family Science Saturdays, every year between 2013- 2020).   Chitra also devotes time to her continued passion to make AI accessible to everyone with her invited talks, webinars and podcasts, and data science courses for re-skilling people impacted by the pandemic.  

 

In 2021, she created a Data Curator Boot Camp in partnership with SheTek to assist people who became unemployed due to the Covid-19 pandemic by training them to acquire new skills in technology so that they could be gainfully employed in the IT sector.  She personally led 3 cohorts of people from all walks of people in 3  boot camp sessions in 2021 to highly positive feedback from the trainees.  "The extra time Dr. Chitra spent with us each session was really helpful." was one of the boot camp survey respondent said.   Her mentoring work and her business mission to address the very human problem of support for families living with dementia are all underpinned by the same motivation - "If you do not work on important problems, it is unlikely you'll do important work".  

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