IIITH to organise annual conference on Technology and Society on 23 February

It brings together social scientists, NGOs, technologists, research groups, innovators, policy makers, impact funders and CSR organizations to deliberate on how emerging technologies can assist and enable rural education and healthcare.

The conference includes plenery panel discussions themed on AI and Society, with special focus on how AI can enable social outcomes. Another session on Healthcare at the BoP, specifically how healthcare can be taken effectively to rural doorsteps.

Another aspect of the conference includes closed-door roundtable discussions among social tech leaders, changemakers and industry experts where they will deliberate on how CSR can fund social change, and collaborating to amplify tech-led impact. It also includes a startup showcase highlighting the successes of startups that have used tech for social impact.

Plenary speakers include Prof Raj Reddy, Chairman, IIITH governing council; Prof P J Narayanan, Director IIITH; Vivek Raghavan, EkStep; Dr Srinath Reddy, PHFI and most likely Ganesh Natarajan (5F world), Ramji Raghavan (Agastya Foundation), Amirullah Khan (CDPP), and Manoj Gopalakrishnan (Care India).

The first edition of the conference coincides with the formal inauguration of IIITH's Raj Reddy Center for Technology and Society (RCTS) to celebrate and amplify Prof Raj Reddy's passion toward research that helps the bottom of the pyramid. Through technology-based solutions in the realm of rural education and healthcare, as well as working directly with NGOs and grassroot organizations to build AI and emerging tech solutions for the NGOs RCTS aims to amplify their impact. Several projects are already underway with few leading NGOs.

More details at https://rcts.iiit.ac.in/

This center is an initiative of IIIT Hyderabad to enable research and emerging technology led solutions for grassroot education and public health, with specific emphasis on the rural population. The problem faced by the bottom of the societal pyramid is huge and needs solutions that can be scaled to billions of underprivileged. Several NGOs have been doing a phenomenal job on ground but many NGOs don't have access to the latest research and technology solutions. This limits the scale amplification due to dependency on volunteers alone to scale. Access to technology research institutions will help leverage emerging and futuristic technologies (including AI, Virtual Reality, and others) to amplify their impact. The centre will pursue two broad directions for high societal impact: innovations in rural education, and innovation in healthcare for underprivileged sections of society.

The International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH) is an autonomous research university founded in 1998 that focuses on the core areas of Information Technology, such as Computer Science, Electronics and Communications, and their applications in other domains through inter-disciplinary research with great social impact. Some of its research domains include Visual Information Technologies, Human Language Technologies, Data Engineering, VLSI and Embedded Systems, Computer Architecture, Wireless Communications, Algorithms and Information Security, Robotics, Building Science, Earthquake Engineering, Computational Natural Sciences and Bioinformatics, IT in Agriculture and e-Governance.

Website: www.iiit.ac.in

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