Dr Anand Koirala is working as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Institute for Future Farming

Systems (IFFS), School of Health and Applied Sciences, CQUniversity, Australia. He obtained his

PhD in Precision Agriculture- exploration of machine learning approaches, from CQUniversity.

He has completed Master of Engineering Science (Electrical and Electronics) from University of

Southern Queensland, Australia and Bachelors of Electronics and Communications Engineering

form Tribhuvan University, Nepal. Anand has experience in researching and developing machine

vision solutions (deep learning and image processing) and decision support systems (yield

prediction and mapping for farm management and market planning) for several industry

partners. With numerous publications in related field, his research outcomes have been

implemented in horticulture- for flower and fruit assessment in orchard (classification,

detection, counting and sizing) and fisheries- optical grading of live fish. With interest in robotics

and automation he has also developed machine vision software for mango harvester. Anand

also has experience delivering machine vision solutions and consulting services for Australian

industries through FORAIST ( https://foraist.com ).

Email: anand.koirala@cqumail.com.

Anjani Phuyal is a Global CTO of Genese Solution and CEO of Genese Cloud Academy. He has 15 years of experience nationally and internationally in the IT and education department. Currently, he is also associated with a reputed College in Nepal affiliated to Westcliff University, USA as a visiting Faculty for MBA Students.

Dr. Archana Bhattarai is a tech lead, principle machine learning Engineer at Apple with the interest in machine learning, data science, natural language processing, information extraction and retrieval with a focus on deep learning and knowledge graph based technologies in information extraction and query understanding. She has over 10 years of industry experience in information retrieval and machine learning in reputed companies such as Apple, Yahoo, Sharecare and Forbes Travel Guide. She holds a Ph.D. in computer science from University of Memphis, USA and double Masters from Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand and Telecom SudParis, France. During her research years, she has published numerous papers/Journals at IEEE, SIAM, ACL-HLT, Asia Pacific Networking Group, International Conferences in Intelligent Text Processing and computational Linguistics, etc. She has received best student paper award in Computational Intelligence in Cyber Security (CICS) at the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence (SSCI). She has also served as a reviewer in previous mentioned conferences.

Dr. Bal Krishna Bal is Associate Professor & Head of Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Kathmandu University. He did PhD in Computer Science & Engineering from Kathmandu University and Masters and Bachelors in rowrmatics and Computer Engineering from Volgograd State Technical University, Russia. He is one of the pioneering researchers working with Artificial Intelligence(AI) and Nepali language, embarking in this field as a Natural Language Processing Researcher at Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya in 2005. Besides leading computer science and AI education and research, he is also associated with various innovative organizations such as KEIV Technologies, Language Technology Kendra, and VistaTec.

Personal Website: http://old.ku.edu.np/cse/faculty/bal/

Dr. Bhogendra Mishra is a spatial data scientist at Science Hub. In addition, he is a visiting faculty in Nepal Open University. His expertise is remote sensing data analysis for diverse applications that include but not limited to land cover change detection, crop monitoring, hydrology, disasters along with others. He completed Master’s degree in Computer Science from Tribhuvan University, Nepal, receiving “Nepal Bidhya Bhusan Kha” for his outstanding performance, and Master of Remote Sensing and GIS from Asian Institute of Technology, and received “The John A. Hones Prize” in recognition of the most outstanding academic performance and Doctorate in Engineering from Kyoto University Japan. He served in a number of development organizations as a subject specialist in Asia Pacific regions and as a researcher in ITC, Netherlands. He has published a number of scientific publications in the highly reputed journals in the field and presented his work in a large number of international conferences and workshops.

Dr. Binod Bhattarai is a Senior Research Fellow in University College London. Before joining the UCL, he was a post doctoral research associate in Computer vision and research lab Imperial College London. He also worked as a Data Scientist at Telenor Group in Bangkok. He obtained his doctoral degree from Normandie Universite, Caen, France in and Masters degree from Saarland University, Germany. His main research interests are in Natural language processing and computer vision. He has a number of papers published in high impact international conferences and journals such as CVPR, ECCV, ICASSP. He is involved as Industry co-ordinator in NAAMII, Nepal has been a program chair in the first and second Nepal winter school in Artificial Intelligence.

Dr. Bishesh Khanal is a full-time Research Scientist and Director at NAAMII.

He is interested in pushing the boundaries of Machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in both theory and applications with particular interest in applications relevant to Low and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). He leads a research group TOADS within NAAMII: Transforming glObal heAlth with afforDable and incluSive AI. TOADS focus on developing and applying biomedical computer vision methods that are relevant for low-cost medical imaging solutions including smart-phone solutions, and in improving Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Nepali language in order to enable the use of chatbots, voice bots and automated processing of clinical reports for health care applications. His interest lies in identifying and working on clinical translational research projects that are relevant to resource-constrained settings of the least developed world.

Dr. Rai got her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where she worked in education technologies. She identifies herself as a socialist feminist and is a writer, programmer, and designer. Dr. Rai is currently working as a Research Fellow at Global Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies (GIIS), coordinating the research group ‘AI and Emerging Technologies for Sustainable Future.’ She is also a co-founder of Sujhaab Chautaari, a career counseling platform for the youth of Nepal.

Jhanak Parajuli is a researcher and data scientist, currently working in DHL express Germany. He received his doctoral degree in computer science and electrical engineering from Jacobs University Bremen in 2016 and has worked in different companies in Germany since 2017. His research works are related to interference management in wireless communications using non-linear manifold learning. He has experiences working with different machine learning and deep learning techniques and building the whole industrial pipeline to bring the model into production. He is also one of the founding members of machine learning and data science network (MLDSN) Nepal.

Er. Jnaneshwar Bohara is working as a computer engineer in the Government of Nepal. He is a gold medalist from Tribhuvan University, Institute of Engineering in Masters of Computer Systems and Knowledge engineering. He has more than 10 years of experience in IT field and has been working on National ID project from its beginning. Before joining Government of Nepal, he worked in Verisek Information Technology for more than 5 years in the capacity of Senior Software engineer and Technical lead. His core expertise is Java and Big Data tools from Hadoop ecosystem like MapReduce, Hbase, MongoDB, spark. His research entitled "MapReduce based approach to longest common sequence in BioSequences" is published as a book from Lambert publication Germany and is available in Amazon as ebook.

Dr. Manoj Karkee is an Associate Professor in the Biological Systems Engineering Department at Washington State University (WSU). He received his undergraduate in Computer Engineering from Tribhuvan University, Nepal and his MS in remote sensing and GIS from Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand. His PhD was in Agricultural Engineering and Human Computer Interaction from Iowa State University. Dr. Karkee leads a strong research program in the area of sensing, machine vision and agricultural robotics at the WSU Center for Precision and Automated Agricultural Systems. He has published a book titled ‘Agricultural and Field Robotics, 2021’ and more than 80 peer reviewed articles such journals as ‘Journal of Field Robotics’, ‘Computers and Electronics in Agriculture’, and ‘Transactions of the ASABE’, and has been an invited speaker at numerous national and international conferences and universities. Dr. Karkee is currently serving as an elected chair for International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) Technical Committee 8.1, Control in Agriculture, as an associate editor for ‘Computers and Electronics in Agriculture’, and ‘Transactions of the ASABE’, and as a guest editor for ‘Journal of Field Robotics’. Dr. Karkee was awarded ‘2020 Railbird Engineering Concept of the Year’ by American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, and was recognized as ‘2019 Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence and IoT’ by Connected World magazine.

Rakesh Katuwal is a machine learning engineer at Fusemachines. Prior to joining Fusemachines, he worked as a project officer at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He received his B. Eng. degree from Kathmandu University (KU) and his doctorate from NTU in 2014 and 2020 respectively. His research interests are in ensemble learning, deep learning and open-set recognition. He has a number of peer-reviewed papers and has served as a reviewer for numerous conferences and journals such as WCCI, IEEE-TPAMI, IEEE-TNNLS, Neural Networks, Pattern Recognition etc.

Personal Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katuwal-rakesh/

Razvan Caramalau. is a Research Postgraduate at Imperial College of London in the ISN (Intelligent System Networks) Group, under Dr. T.K. Kim supervision. My research field is at the boundary between machine learning and computer vision. . His topic of interest is to improve generalisation through active learning mainly in applications like 3D hand pose estimation, image classification and object detection.

Dr. Sabita Acharya is a Computer Scientist who is currently working in the R&D Data Science and Artificial Intelligence team at Procter & Gamble. She completed her undergraduate studies from Pulchowk Campus, Institute of Engineering in 2011 and received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2019. Her research interests lie primarily in the fields of Applied NLP, Conversation Agents, and Health Informatics. She has published in several journals and conferences and has received multiple travel grants. Sabita has experience working in startups as well as fortune 500 companies. She was named Illinois Technology Foundation Fifty for Future in 2017.

Dr. Sarbagya Ratna Shakya is an Assistant Professor at Electronics Engineering Technology, Department of Mathematical Science at Eastern New Mexico University, New Mexico, USA. He received a B.Eng. degree in Electronics Engineering from Tribhuvan University of Nepal in 2009, M.Eng. in Computer Engineering from Pokhara University of Nepal in 2014. He received his Ph.D. in Computational Science( computer Science) from the University of Southern Mississippi, USA in 2021. His research interests span across broad areas of machine learning, deep learning, data analysis and high performance computing.

Dr Sunil Aryal is a lecturer in IT at the School of Information Technology, Faculty of Faculty of Science, Engineering and Built Environment, Deakin University, Australia. Prior to joining Deakin University in 2019, he worked as a lecturer at Federation University Australia and sessional teaching staff at various institutions. Before moving to academia, he worked in industry as a data engineer, software developer and IT support officer in Australia and Nepal. He received his PhD from Monash University, Australia. His research is in the areas of Data Mining (DM), Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). He is interested in the applications of DM/ML/AI systems to solve real-world problems in various domains, particularly in healthcare, cyber security, energy and defence. Currently he is focussed on making ML systems robust, fair and explainable.

Tej Bahadur Shahi is an Assistant Professor at the Central Department of Computer Science and information Technology, TU. Currently, He is pursuing his higher degree by research study at CQ University, Australia with RTP scholarship (On study leave). His research interest includes application of machine learning techniques in Natural Language Processing, Environmental Modelling, Crop Management and remote sensing. He has published a number of papers on Nepali language processing and carried out significant research in computer science at the University. He has served Nepal Government for more than four years as an information technology officer, before joining the University.

Dr. Ukash Nakarmi is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at University of Arkansas -Fayetteville, AR, USA. Priot to joining UofA, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Department of Radiology at Stanford University, Stanford, CA. He received a B.E. degree from Tribhuvan University, Nepal, and an M.S. from the Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2018. His research interests span across broad areas of machine learning, big data analysis, and signal processing with applications to medical imaging, radiology and healthcare.

Bishal Lamichhane is a researcher at the Scalable Health Labs, Rice University, and is also working towards a Ph.D. in Data Science in the ECE department. Previously, he worked as a research scientist at Philips Research, Netherlands responsible for state-of-the-art health solutions based on ML/AI, resulting in new product propositions launched in the patient monitoring marketspace and several patent applications. He also worked as a data scientist at Holst Center/IMEC in Netherlands/Belgium researching wearable solutions for health applications. Currently, Bishal is working on an ML/AI solution for the diagnosis and management of mental health disorders in collaboration with Baylor College of Medicine, Cornell University, UT Health, and others.