Varun Ganapathi: AKASA, AI and Healthcare

Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!

In episode 43 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Varun Ganapathi.

Varun is co-founder and CTO at AKASA, a company developing AI systems for healthcare operations. Varun’s previous entrepreneurial experience includes co-founding Numovis, a company focused on motion tracking and computer vision for user interaction that was acquired by Google, and Terminal.com, a browser-based IDE acquired by Udacity. Varun received his PhD from Stanford in 2014.

Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast:  Apple Podcasts  | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on Twitter

Outline:

* (00:00) Intro

* (1:50) Varun’s intro to AI

* (3:25) Working with Andrew Ng

* (7:37) Varun’s road to a PhD

* (13:20) Numovis, Google acquisition

* (15:00) Vacillating between research and entrepreneurship, Terminal.com

* (17:10) Roots of Varun’s interest in AI + healthcare

* (22:30) Research at AKASA, Deep Claim

* (25:45) Causality in claim denial, expert knowledge

* (25:52) we need to trademark the word “gradient”

* (28:20) AKASA’s Unified Automation, expert-in-the-loop

* (34:15) Varun’s near-term and long-term visions for AKASA

* (39:50) Towards “deploying a new version of healthcare”

* (42:25) Varun’s perspective on the role of AI in healthcare, the need for humans in the loop

* (47:02) Varun’s advice for aspiring AI researchers and practitioners

* (51:00) Outro

Links:

* AKASA’s Homepage

* Varun’s research

* AKASA is hiring!