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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.

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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!