about the invited panellists AND SPEAKERS

Dr. Natalia Efremova is a CTO in DeepPlanet and a lecturer in Queen Mary University, London. Natalia has an MBA from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Kyoto, where she was a recipient of a Japanese Government (MEXT) Postgraduate Scholarship.

Natalia has a background in both academia and industry research. Over the past 10 years, she has been working in the field of deep learning for image and video processing. Her work has been commended for successfully meeting challenges set for the global research community in these areas, and her research has been published in the top machine learning venues (ICLR, NeurIPS, IEEE, IJCNN, HRI).

Previously, Natalia was a Research Fellow in the University of Oxford, where she taught courses on AI and neural networks to MBA and executive students. Natalia’s research focuses on applications of machine learning for pursuing sustainable goals. This includes defining the areas where ML tools would be especially advantageous within targets related to climate change, gender equality, sustainable agriculture, water, and food scarcity, as well as monitoring progress towards market adoption of the new AI-based technologies for water-, agri- and waste- tech industries.

Shruti is a senior data scientist passionate about leveraging data science tools and techniques to accelerate the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals 2030. She has widely used causal modeling and forecasting techniques before, and she is strongly interested in corporate sector especially to reason better with environmental-social-governance (ESG) issues broadly focusing on solutions for sustainability, climate change & the energy transition of the future. She has a demonstrated experience in management and academia and has held positions the consumer and consultancy sectors. Prior to that she has finished her Ph.D. + MS in (Engineering) Management from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore under the guidance of Professor Balachandra Patil who is named in the top 2% of scientists world-wide in the Energy domain. She is passionate about diversity and inclusion & has been involved in technical women’s network activities across societies such as IEEE, Google WTM and WiML (Women in Machine Learning). She also had been appointed as a ‘Mentor of Change’ under Niti Aayog’s Atal Innovation Mission in India and she enjoys fostering the communities of AI professionals.

Dr Ravi Pandit is currently a Lecturer in Instrumentation and AI at the Centre for Life-cycle Engineering and Management within the School of Aerospace, Transport and Manufacturing, Cranfield University. Prior to that, he held several academic posts such as Research Fellow (the University of Exeter, 2020-2021), Research Associate (the University of Strathclyde, 2016-2020), Visiting Researcher (UCLM Spain, 2018), Visiting Researcher (Wood plc Scotland, 2016-2017), Assistant Professor(Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering, Jadavpur University. 2014-2016), Assistant Professor(School of Electrical Engineering, VIT Vellore, 2011-2014) respectively. During his professional career, he received a number of prestigious and highly competitive research awards/fellowships, for example, Travel Grant (US$3.5k), Marie Curie Fellowship (of value £224,325.00), Erasmus Mundas (of value € 129,000). As of now, has published numerous papers in highly ranked journals (mostly in Q1 & Q2) and has presented his research at several international conferences and workshops in these areas. Overall, he has more than 10 years of academic and research experience; with various reputed academics and industries through a number of interdisciplinary projects. In particular, his research on predictive maintenance and condition monitoring for wind turbines with Data analytics/ML has received significant interest in the wind energy sector.