THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!
From the 3rd Annual Shorty Social Good Awards

Democratizing Artificial Intelligence

Finalist in Artificial Intelligence

Objectives

The mission of Fusemachines is to democratize Artificial Intelligence or to make it accessible to every individual and organization across the world.

Strategy and Execution

We have used a 3-prong approach to the objective of democratizing AI: services, software, and education. Our core business of providing AI talent and helping companies build incredible products takes care of the first two aspects. We want organizations in any part of the world to be able to leverage Artificial Intelligence and solve problems, big & small.

In order to bring awareness to and have honest conversations around AI, we started a monthly event called the 'Democratize AI' meetup along with few smaller, industry-specific programs on the implications of Artificial Intelligence. Topics we have covered are as follows: The Future of Work, Bias & Privacy in the Age of AI, etc. These events have become very popular in NYC and have helped create a community of like-minded individuals and practitioners.

Our biggest social initiative has been around education - our endeavor is to enable students in underserved communities across the world and provide quality training/mentorship in Artificial Intelligence. In 2017, we launched the Fusemachines AI Fellowship, which is a year-long training program. At the end of the program, Fellows get a Micromasters degree in AI from Columbia University. The program is now run in NYC, Nepal, Rwanda and Dominican Republic. Later this year, it will also be launched in Burkina Faso (West Africa) and Peru. Additionally, we just launched our Global AI Scholarship program to provide scholarships to 10,000 students across the world. This scholarship program will enable Fusemachines to scale our educational endeavors and make a bigger impact.

Results

The Democratize AI meetup has 200+ attendees for every session and positive reviews. The AI Fellowship has succeeded to train hundreds of engineers globally. Our Fellows have built drones to deliver blood and medical supplies during disaster relief, and worked on image recognition projects. Through our AI-as-a-service business, we have enabled organizations to use Artificial Intelligence.

Media

Entrant Company / Organization Name

Fusemachines Inc., Preeti P Adhikary