Omdena is a global platform that uses a bottom-up collaborative model to build AI and ML solutions. People from all over the world come together and collaboratively solve challenges using AI. It not only enforces ethical, affordable, and efficient solution building but also leads to the democratization, trust and higher adoption of AI solutions. The success of such a model is evident from the fact that in only 18 months, over 1700 AI engineers from 86 countries have collaborated through the Omdena platform and developed AI solutions for 36 global organizations. World-renowned organizations like UNHCR, World Resource Institute, World Energy Council, World Food Program, UNDP, as well as award winning Startups have benefited from Omdena.

Visionary Leadership Guiding AI Success

Omdena Founder, Rudradeb Mitra started his career as an AI researcher in 2002 and has worked with research labs, universities, startups, and banks to build AI products. During this period, he also published ten research papers on AI. After graduating from the University of Cambridge, Rudradeb entered the startup world and built several tech startups. He is currently a mentor of Google for Startups, and Seedstar, and in past of, MIT Enterprise, Founders Institute, and We Work Labs. Rudradeb has been invited to speak at over 100 events from 30 countries.

Further, he wrote his first book titled "Creating Value with Artificial Intelligence." In this book, Rudradeb highlights the power of AI and how it can be used to solve social problems. Through this book, he aims to bridge the gap between the commoner's world and the AI technical world.

Speaking about his role at Omdena, Rudradeb oversees all aspects of the company, manages the team, directly runs the sales, and assists in building the company's future vision and strategic direction. According to Rudradeb, his experience with living and working in different countries helped him comprehend the true potential of people and work on a bottom-up collaborative platform.

Inspired by the vision of creating a world with equal opportunities for all, he established Omdena, where AI can be used for social good and build solutions for the people at the bottom of the pyramid. Through Omdena as a medium, he is giving AI engineers opportunities to transcend geographical borders and collaboratively work to solve real-world problems, whilst learning from each other every single day.

Delivering Unique AI Solutions to Address Social Issues

Rudradeb reveals that people find it hard to believe that  50-60 engineers from all over the world, who have never met each other before, can come together and build something as sophisticated as AI models. But Omdena has shown that not only it is possible but it is the best way to build AI models. A partner organization describes their experience in the following words:

"The power of a collaborative team of  50 AI engineers brought us a deployable AI model within two months. Something that would have taken us at least six months, using traditional development approaches."

Some of Omdena's previous successful collaboration project stories are:

• Solar AI, a Singapore based startup incubated as a part of ENGIE Factory, teamed up with Omdena to hyper-scale the deployment of distributed solar and the transition towards 100% renewables by modernizing the way rooftop solar is sold.

• Partnering with Safecity India, who developed a mobile app, used by men and women to report sexual harassment. By March this year, over 15000 incidents of sexual harassment have been reported on the app. The app data contains the location, time, kind of incident, and free text to share the experience. Omdena used the data to generate heat maps of incidents and then used a route planning algorithm to suggest the nearest safe area (hospital, police station, or metro station).

• In partnership with the UN World Food Program (UNWFP) in Nepal, Omdena's data science community built a deep learning model to fight hunger by locating, tracking, and improving the growth of crops such as rice and wheat. In this project, 32 collaborators from 18 countries took on the challenge of using machine learning for crop classification.

• Forty-seven Omdena collaborators built a deployable AI model for early identification of fires to save lives and reduce infrastructure costs. It achieved this in collaboration with Brazilian startup Sintecsys, by scaling its wildfires detection solution. Together they worked on an AI system that processes daytime images from 360-degree cameras mounted on towers and alerts staff in case fire or smoke is detected. This system has an accuracy rate of over 95% in identifying smoke and flames, thus, dramatically reducing false positives and the time until firefighters are called onto the scene.

Redefining the Hallmarks of a Leader

Rudradeb believes new technologies like AI, IoT, Big Data, cloud computing have a colossal role in shaping today's innovation as new opportunities and possibilities show up. However, he does not think the role of a leader has changed nor will change with respect to these dynamic and disruptive technologies. He asserts that the attributes of a good leader remain the same over ages. He conveys this by citing the proverbial that any leader can be willing to listen and understand people, yet a great leader is one who creates other leaders, not followers.

Plans for Future Endeavors

Omdena aims to make AI accessible to many more organizations. In fact, Omdena is launching a first-of-its-kind incubator program, where 50 global impact startups will get support to build and launch their AI solutions in 2021.

In terms of the industry, Rudradeb hopes more and more companies work on building solutions and products driven by solving social, environmental, humanitarian challenges rather than just maximizing shareholders' profits in the near future.