User:Fj200/sandbox

Devaki Raj is an entrepreneur, founder and CEO of deep-learning company CrowdAi.

Early Life

Devaki Raj grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts where she attended Lexington High School. Upon graduation from high school, she gained acceptance into the prestigious University of Oxford. At the University of Oxford, she received both a bachelor’s degree in Biology and a Master of Science in Applied Statistics.

Career

After university, Raj occupied various roles, first becoming a research assistant at Harvard in their department of molecular and cellular biology. After that she moved to becoming a statistician at the Malaria Atlas Project before moving to PA Consulting Group as a Technology Analyst.1Raj then became employed with Google, where she helped them leverage data to help identify and solve various world problems. While at Google, she held position as both a data scientist and part-time product manager.2

CrowdAi

While at Google, Raj and co-workers, Nic Borensztein, and Pablo Garcia decided to jump at the opportunity to be exploited in the training data market. Previously, companies trained AI by getting large groups of people to tag as many images as possible. Training data are the means for AI to identify worldly objects and matters in ways that humans can comprehend. CrowdAI’s software uses deep learning to identify trends the data in order to start learning by example.3

CrowdAi specializes in deep learning from satellite and road imagery. They aim at combining the two and focusing in on the emerging autonomous-vehicle market. This was an early aim and they secured a deal with GM startup Cruise Automation. CrowdAi’s software leads the industry in being able to categorize 70-99% of what it sees.

Companies may work with CrowdAI by sending them their imagery, whether it be from a satellite, drone, or autonomous vehicle. CrowdAI then allows its software to recognize certain objects of interest, while this happens, the team is simultaneously correcting the AI as it starts to recognize patterns. This allows business to outsource instead of having in-house AI capabilities. The company has raised money from several investors, including Susa Ventures, Box Group, SV Angel, Metamorphic, and Yahoo’s founder Jerry Yang.4

Recognition

Forbes 30 Under 30 (Nov 2018) Bill and Melinda Gates Travel Award (2008) Henry David Thoreau Scholarship (2007) Inc's 30 Companies Under 30 (2017) Personal Life

Raj is trilingual, she can speak English, Kannada, and French.

1 https://www.linkedin.com/in/devaki-raj-31205826/

2 Devaki Raj: Henry David Thoreau Foundation. (n.d.). Retrieved from

https://www.thoreauscholar.org/scholar-profiles/devaki-raj

3 Bercovici, J. (2017, June 5). CrowdAI Wants to Give Satellite Imaging an Assist From the Crowd.

Retrieved from https://www.inc.com/jeff-bercovici/30-under-30-2017-crowdai.html

4 Constine, J. (2017, January 5). CrowdAI sells artificial-intelligence-as-a-service. Retrieved from

https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/05/crowdai/