AI start-up founder with academic achievements to her name: Who is Suchana Seth?

Bengaluru, DHNS: Suchana Seth, the 39-year-old Bengaluru-based startup founder who was arrested on Monday on suspicion of killing her 4-year-old son in Goa, had founded her artificial intelligence firm Mindful AI Lab in 2020 after serving in various capacities in several companies across Bengaluru and the United States.

Seth, who originally hails from West Bengal, holds two software patents in the US for work on natural language processing, specifically dialogue mining and customer interaction personalisation.

She is also a published contributor to the Economic and Political Weekly where her article from 2017 talks about how machine learning and AI interact with and infringe upon the right to privacy and how predictive algorithms can be made fair, accountable, and transparent.

The executive was named among the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics List in 2021 by Women in AI Ethics, a project by California-based non-profit organisation Social Good Fund that is focused on recognising and supporting women working in the ethical AI space.

Before establishing her own AI startup, Seth was a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and was a Mozilla Fellow at Data & Society in New York City, where she hosted a podcast on fairness in machine learning. She had earlier been a research fellow at the Raman Research Institute in Bengaluru.

Her Berkman Klein and Mozilla profiles describe her as someone who “believes in the power of data to drive positive change, volunteers with DataKind, mentors data-for-good projects, and advises research on IoT ethics. She is also passionate about closing the gender gap in data science, and leads data science workshops with organisations like Women Who Code".

She holds a Master of Science degree in Physics from the University of Calcutta, which she received in 2008 and a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Bhawanipur Education Society College in Kolkata. Seth also has a post-graduate diploma in Sanskrit, where she was a rank holder.

The nascent startup she founded in 2020 was focused on AI ethics advisory and auditing and as per its LinkedIn page, has a very small team there consisting of her and one other employee. The firm offers “AI ethics advisory services, audits AI systems and data practices, and empowers humans to build ethical AI.”

As per her LinkedIn profile, which has since been flooded by derogatory comments, "Suchana is an AI ethics expert and data scientist with over 12 years of experience in mentoring data science teams, and scaling machine learning solutions at startups and industry research labs.'' She was not very active on her other social media profiles, and her Instagram can be seen filled with pictures of AI artwork, her son and her travel experiences.