The name of a lesser-known artificial intelligence start-up started cropping up in the news on Tuesday when its CEO Suchana Seth was arrested for allegedly killing her four-year-old son in Goa.
Seth had stuffed the body of her child in a bag and left for Bengaluru in a taxi. The murder came to light when the housekeeping staff of the service apartment where she was staying in Goa went to clean the room in which she stayed with the child and found blood stains on the towel. The Goa police arrested Seth from Chitradurga in Karnataka. The motive behind the killing was not yet known.
Seth heads The Mindful AI Lab, which according to its LinkedIn profile, has fewer than 10 employees.
According to the company website, The Mindful AI Lab combines expertise in 'privacy by design', 'bias mitigation', 'explainable AI', 'robust AI' and governing AI' "with a deep understanding of the ethics of emerging technologies."
The Mindful AI Lab is adept at "AI ethics and hands on prototyping, deployment and scaling of machine learning systems", according to the company.
We empower humans to build ethical AI, the company states in its 'About Us' section.
"We believe that ethical thinking is a learnable skill, and we co-create AI ethics ownership and accountability structures that work in the specific context of your team. We go beyond cookie-cutter, “automated” AI ethics risk assessment “tools” that give zero guidance on how to operationalize ethics in the context of real world data. We work hard to track the state of the art in AI ethics practice so you can focus on building a great data product," the company's philosophy reads.
The Mindful AI Lab operationalises ethics at each stage of the AI project life cycle in line with industry standards and current research, offers technical design, audit, and post-deployment advisory services for AI products and data practices, and helps companies operationalise responsible AI strategy in alignment with the organisation’s needs, values and goals.
However, only Seth's name is listed on the team. According to her bio, she has advised research on IoT ethics, mentored data-for-good projects with DataKind, and led data science workshops.
Seth, who has been a Mozilla Fellow at Data & Society, a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Centre at Harvard University, and a research fellow at the Raman Research Institute, has, according to the website, 12 years of experience in mentoring data science teams.