Web Science Challenges in India with Ravindran Balaraman

Ravindran (Ravi) Balaraman is our guest for this episode (23 min. long). He is the Mindtree faculty fellow and a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. And he also heads the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at IIT Madras, which is the leading interdisciplinary AI research center in India and India’s first lab to join the Web Science Trust Network of laboratories from around the world. His research is pushing the boundaries of reinforcement learning, social network analysis, and data text mining.

In this episode, Ravi explains the unique challenges that India faces in web science, including how displaced migrants feeling alienated from the Web. He also explains some solutions, like increasing access to devices with local languages programmed in. And Ravi talks about the importance of AI and how that can help or hurt in pursuits of different social goods, as well as just how explainable AI could get. To hear about all this and more, listen to the full episode!

Click here for this episode’s transcript, and click here for this episode's show notes.