And& Leuven is an innovation conference and festival that brings together changemakers of today to inspire curious minds of all backgrounds. It provides a platform for interdisciplinary innovation that aims to transform our society & acts upon the challenges we face today.

Will AI be a driving force for good or a cautionary tale of technology gone wrong?

It's one of the 21 questions that will be asked at the And& Festival 2021.

I will part of the panel with Sebastiaan Van den Branden, data analyst for In The Pocket; Jonathan Berte, CEO of Robovision; and Ann Dooms, professor at the Department of Mathematics and Data Science the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

For more information and to purchase tickets, visit: https://www.andleuven.com/en/question/question-08

COVID-19 is impacting lives everywhere, forcing us to create new ways of behaving, thinking, and surviving. Young people are among those facing the most challenges – school in 2020 looks nothing like it did before.

How are young people coping with this massive change in their lives?

TEDx Lehigh River invites you to gain perspective on this issue in a “Back to School” virtual conversation with three exceptional and innovative young people from the Lehigh Valley.

Don't forget to register if you plan to join us on Zoom (registration link). You can also watch with us on Facebook LIVE!

I’m excited to present this year at the FIRST Robotics World Championship event in Detroit, MI.

I will be conducting a hands-on workshop: Artificial Intelligence Crash Course: Learn How to Code and Run Neural Networks.

In this workshop, we'll begin by going over the fundamental concepts and recent breakthroughs behind AI's growth. We'll continue by discussing the intuition, theory, and implementation behind the most popular subfields of AI, Deep Learning and Neural Networks.

You'll learn how to develop the algorithms for yourself. Basic knowledge of Python is helpful, but not necessary, as we'll be walking through each step comprehensively. All you need for this workshop, to learn about the future of technology, is a computer with internet connectivity.

(Location: 252A)

In addition to the speakers, TEDxLehighRiver event features Innovation Alley -- bringing another group of innovators, tinkerers, entrepreneurs and thinkers into the mix.

Having contributed as a speaker last year, I will be attending this year to share PlantumAI Platform and VocalEyes App at the Innovation Alley with the attendees.

Here is the link to purchase the tickets for the TEDxLehighRiver event: https://whennow.com/event/tedxlehighriver---alwaysnever-sometimesmaybe

Presenting our paper at Beyond First Order Methods in ML workshop at the conference.

The title of the paper: FD-Net with Auxiliary Time Steps: Fast Prediction of PDEs using Hessian-Free Trust-Region Methods. Nur Sila Gulgec (Lehigh University); Zheng Shi (Lehigh University); Neil Deshmukh (Moravian Academy); Shamim Pakzad (Lehigh University); Martin Takac (Lehigh University)

Higher-order methods, such as Newton, quasi-Newton and adaptive gradient descent methods, are extensively used in many scientific and engineering domains. At least in theory, these methods possess several nice features: they exploit local curvature information to mitigate the effects of ill-conditioning, they avoid or diminish the need for hyper-parameter tuning, and they have enough concurrency to take advantage of distributed computing environments. Researchers have even developed stochastic versions of higher-order methods, that feature speed and scalability by incorporating curvature information in an economical and judicious manner. However, often, higher-order methods are “undervalued.”

The workshop will attempt to shed light on this statement. Topics of interest include --but are not limited to-- second-order methods, adaptive gradient descent methods, regularization techniques, as well as techniques based on higher-order derivatives.

(Location: West 211 - 214)

Presenting the poster at New in ML workshop at the conference.

The title of the related paper: Semi-Supervised Natural Language Processing Approach for Fine-Grained Classification of Medical Reports Neil Deshmukh (Moravian Academy), Selin Gumustop*, Romane Gauriau*, Varun Buch*, Bradley Wright*, Christopher Bridge*, Ram Naidu*, Katherine Andriole*, Bernardo Bizzo* (Note: * indicates the person is affiliated with MGH & BWH Center for Clinical Data Science, Boston, MA)

This special New in ML workshop is co-locating with NeurIPS 2019. The organizers are targeting the researchers who has not published a paper at the NeurIPS main conference yet. Top NeurIPS researchers will review the work and share with the researchers their experience in poster sessions and mentoring sessions.

(Location: East Meeting Level 11,12)

Wills Eye Hospital - Birdshot Day

Wills Eye Hospital is a non-profit eye clinic and hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was established in 1832 and is the oldest continually operating eye-care facility in the United States.

The event is a patient advocacy and education event for those affected by Birdshot chorioretinopathy.

I will be speaking to introduce VocalEyes App and also about the latest AI-related research in Ophthalmology.

The inaugural PA STEAM Fest 2019 focuses on a mix of Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Makers (STEAM), Electronic Entertainment, and Manufacturing & Production in a Steampunk theme. Founded by WeDiscoverGeeks in partnership with ArtsQuest. The event will promote programs and interests in these industries for families, digital educators, businesses, institutes, and everyone else interested in today’s modern culture and the historical evolution of Steampunk! This event includes workshops, lesson seminars, educational panels, new innovation, demos, digital artists, makers, geek entertainment, cosplay, and more!

I will be presenting “Delving into STEAM Education and AI”.

MOPTA 2019 aims at bringing together a diverse group of people from both discrete and continuous optimization, working on both theoretical and applied aspects. There will be a small number of invited talks from distinguished speakers and contributed talks, spread over three days. The target is to present a diverse set of exciting new developments from different optimization areas while at the same time providing a setting which will allow increased interaction among the participants. Organizers aim to bring together researchers from both the theoretical and applied communities who do not usually have the chance to interact in the framework of a medium-scale event.

My presentation will focus on the isolation of the waveform data, the noise filtration via normalization, Butterworth and forward-backward filter application, and Fast Fourier transformation. It will also discuss one of the projects I worked on that has the trained Artificial Neural Network (ANN) contained 23 dense layers with the number of neurons decreasing per two layers with ReLU activation, how Multiclass activation was used along with AdamOptimizer.

I’m excited to present this year at the FIRST Robotics World Championship event in Houston, TX.

I will be conducting a hands-on workshop: Artificial Intelligence Crash Course: Learn How to Code and Run Neural Networks.

In this workshop, we'll begin by going over the fundamental concepts and recent breakthroughs behind AI's growth. We'll continue by discussing the intuition, theory, and implementation behind the most popular subfields of AI, Deep Learning and Neural Networks.

You'll learn how to develop the algorithms for yourself. Basic knowledge of Python is helpful, but not necessary, as we'll be walking through each step comprehensively. All you need for this workshop, to learn about the future of technology, is a computer with internet connectivity.

(Location: GRB-370CF)

The presentation will focus on how anyone can make a change in their community through entrepreneurship. We will explore how to develop market opportunities to make the technology accessible to vulnerable and under-served populations that need help the most. We will discuss social entrepreneurship, and how anyone can take steps to make a difference. I will share the experiences and lessons I have learned from my endeavors, PlantumAI and VocalEyes.

Anyone can be an entrepreneur, all it takes is the pursuit of change.

(Location: GRB-370B)

If you are interested in the Medico-Legal aspects of AI and live in the Greater New York Area, you will not want to miss the opportunity to attend this conference. I’m excited to be one of the presenters!

Some of the distinguished speakers at the conference are:

• Mark Michalski, MD, Executive Director, Center for Clinical Data Science, Harvard Medical School's Massachusetts General Hospital

• Joe Marks, Ph.D., Executive Director, Center for Machine Learning and Health, Carnegie Mellon University

• Yvonne W. Lui, MD, Associate Chair for Artificial Intelligence, Department of Radiology, NYU School of Medicine

• Trishan Panch, MD, Founder & CMO, Wellframe, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, MIT Institute of Medical Engineering and Sciences

I will be conducting a hands-on workshop for developing machine learning apps at the FIRST Championship event in Detroit, MI.

I will also be sharing my entrepreneurship experiences on Wednesday, April 25th, 7:00 PM-8:00 PM.

If you are at the FIRST Championship Detroit, I would love to meet you!

My Keynote presentation focuses on social entrepreneurship and how to take the first steps to make a difference, as well as how to identify problems in the community and how to solve them using (limited) resources. I will share the development of VocalEyes that helps visually impaired people navigate the world using AI on smartphones, and PlantumAI which aids farmers in developing countries to identify crop diseases using algorithms.

I will speak how to develop market opportunities to make his technology accessible to vulnerable and underserved populations.