2021 Awardees

Each project team will receive funding, technical contributions from Google and access to computational resources. Academics in this program will be recognized as “Impact Scholars” for their contributions towards advancing research for social good.

Congratulations to all the recipients of this round’s support. We’re looking forward to continuing to nurture the AI for Social Good community, bringing together experts from diverse backgrounds with the common goal of advancing AI to improve lives around the world.

Agriculture

• Building AI-based Market Intelligence Systems for Farmer Collectives w/ Aaditeshwar Seth (Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi) and Centre for Collective Development (India)

• High-resolution Satellite Imagery for Modeling the Impact of Aridification on Crop Production: Paddy Cultivation in the Cauvery Delta w/ Saket Anand (Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi) and M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (India)

• Incentive Engineering and Truthful Mechanisms for Grassland Quality and Local Market Price Estimation in Africa w/ Long Tran-Thanh (University of Warwick) and AfriScout (Kenya)

• What Should I Grow Today so I Make Money Tomorrow? Using Social, Environmental, and Market Data to Support Small Farmers’ Crop Planning w/ John Dickerson (University of Maryland, College Park) and Kheyti (India)

• Adoption of smartphone agro-applications for field-based disease diagnosis and real-time feedback for smallholder farmers w/ Godliver Owomugisha (Busitema University) and Papoli Community Development Foundation (Uganda)

• Towards Achieving Better Market Access for Smallholder Farmers w/ Daphney-Stavroula Zois (University at Albany, SUNY) and AGRI-WEB (Ghana)

Conservation

• AI for Animal Census w/ Trevor Darrell (UC Berkeley) and Wildlife Conservation Society (Nigeria)

• Applying AI to Data Challenges in Wildlife Conservation w/ Nataliya Tkachenko (University of Oxford) and Panthera (Nepal, India, Malaysia, Senegal)

• Collating and analyzing multi-modal, multi-lingual data for countering wildlife crime w/ Poonam Goyal, Naveen Goyal (BITS Pilani) and Wildlife Conservation Society (India)

• Exploring and Managing human-bee conflict in Asian cities using AI w/ Wei Guo (University of Tokyo), National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore and Bioversity International (India)

• Harnessing Agent-Based Models to Mitigate Marine Conservation Conflict in the Andamans w/ Amulya Yadav (Penn State University) and Dakshin Foundation (India)

• Human-in-the-loop Chimpanzee Identification w/ Gianluca Demartini (University of Queensland) and Wild Chimpanzee Foundation (Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Guinea)

• Human-in-the-Loop Labelling System for Elephant Identification and Tracking w/ Ashwin Srinivasan (BITS Pilani, Goa Campus) and Mara Elephant Project (Kenya)

• Media Text Monitoring for Timely Conservation Actions w/ Fei Fang (Carnegie Mellon University) and World Wild Fund for Nature (India, Nepal, Thailand)

• Using AI to impute missing data in the SDG indicators and test causality w/ Patrick McSharry (Carnegie Mellon University) and Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (Japan)

• Using Machine Learning to Predict Deforestation w/ Andrew Katumba and Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende (Makerere University) and Moja Global (Uganda)

• Combating Poaching through Community Influence w/ Haifeng Xu (University of Virginia) and World Wildlife Fund (Lao PDR)

Public Health

• AI-based Smart Assistant for Child Deliveries in Low Resource Areas w/ Vipul Arora (IIT Kanpur) and CARE India Solutions for Sustainable Development (India)

• Artificial Intelligence for Health Promotion Intervention in India w/ Thanh H. Nguyen (University of Oregon) and Arogya World (India)

• Augmenting Community Health Workers Efficacy using AI w/ Himabindu Lakkaraju (Harvard University) and Living Goods (Kenya, Uganda)

• Data-driven Vaccine Demand Forecasting and Health Interventions in Nigeria w/ Ayan Mukhopadhyay (Vanderbilt University) HelpMum (Nigeria)

• Deep Learning for Oral Cancer Screening and Referral: A Feasibility Investigation w/ Conrad Tucker (Carnegie Mellon University) and Centre for Chronic Disease Control (India)

• Incentive Design for Better Health Coverage w/ Arunesh Sinha (Singapore Management University) and D-tree (Zanzibar)

• Intelligent Assistive System for Home-Based Care Delivery w/ U. Deva Priyakumar (IIIT Hyderabad) and Lord's Education Health Society | Wadhwani Initiative for Sustainable Healthcare (India)

• Leave No One Behind: Spatial AI Enabled Settlement Mapping to Enhance WASH Access for Vulnerable Populations w/ Yiqun Xie (University of Maryland, College Park) and Aquaya Institute (Kenya)

• Predicting early exit from the m2m health program w/ Toby Walsh, Yang Song (UNSW Sydney) and Mothers2Mothers (South Africa)

• AI-guided systematic intervention and prediction of progression in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy w/ Malay Bhattacharyya (ISI Kolkata) and Molecular Diagnostics, Counseling, Care and Research Center (India)

• The Bootstrap Problem in Recommender Systems w/ Toby Walsh, Yang Song (UNSW Sydney) and Infoxchange (Australia)

• Using AI to Prevent the Risk of Maternal and Neonatal Deaths in Kenya w/ Amulya Yadav (Penn State University) and Jacaranda Health (Kenya)

• Reducing Crop Burning to Improve Air Quality in India w/ Rayid Ghani (Carnegie Mellon University) and Energy Harvest Charitable Trust (India)