REDX mentors crucial to shaping the youth and future of a nation...
Role of a REDX Mentor In Student Innovation Journies
Did you know that a mentor’s leadership style leads to higher rates of success and satisfaction in a team? Imagine what your startup or innovation journey would look like without input from mentors and stakeholders? Critical insights into innovation failures and words of wisdom which arise out of past experiences, make mentors crucial to an innovator’s success. When it comes to REDX innovation journies, this is only a beginning; regional, communitywide and countrywide impact landscaped by REDX innovators clearly indicates that REDX innovation mentors are shaping the fate of a society and a nation itself!
In this blog, I showcase an interview with Sabyasachi Mukhopadhyay who played a major role in catalyzing the adoption of a novel innovation model conceived by Dr. Ramesh Raskar at the MIT Media Lab (a digital innovation platform called redx.io based on flipped venture model). As I dug deeper into his contributions to the student and young innovator community in eastern India, the importance of a mentor and mentorship in a REDX innovator’s journey became even more evident to me.
Sabyasachi spearheaded the REDX platform amongst the youth from eastern India, the platform, he says, provides freedom of thinking, with no pressure to advance an idea to meet business goals. “There is no should and must for showing outcomes, also if something is not working, there is the scope of correcting oneself and help the innovator community to understand and focus on the issue”, says Sabyasachi.
Sabyasachi's interview revealed that most students are confused about how to pursue their career and do not know which technologies may become obsolete by the time they master them.
REDX innovation platform provides exposure to Industry 4.0 standards and gives them a flavor of innovation cycles, also gives them an opportunity to experience the feeling of creating social impact.
In his own words, here is a narrative of how he inspired the student community to wake up to higher outcomes in their innovation journeys.
Q1: Sabya, how did you get involved with the REDX innovation initiative in eastern India?
We know Dr. Ramesh Raskar since MIT Kumbhathon, and he was looking to extend operations in the east. With the success of our Facebook Developer Circle and its growing in popularity in eastern India innovator community, Dr. Ramesh Raskar proposed the possibility of empowering innovators in the east by building REDX Eastern India Community.
REDX Rootalpha Club was founded at a startup to kick this off. REDX Buildathon sessions were conducted for a larger audience in four institutions i.e., IISER Kolkata, IIEST Shibpur, NIT Durgapur, IITISM, MSIT Kolkota. The motto of these sessions was to teach students how to go about innovation and apply skills matrix for team building for e.g. if you are strong in deep learning, or app development or in marketing and management, what is an optimized way of allocating your strengths in forming a team.
Conducting idea scrutiny, market scrutiny and building a prototype, constitute the ingredients of these Buildathon sessions which are meant to introduce students to the idea of innovation. From these sessions, I picked outstanding candidates and recommended them as members to REDX Rootalpha. This is how we started our REDX eastern India club journey.
Q2: Do the Buildathons use Spot Process? And how long is that session?
The time slot for Buildathons varies between 1–1.5 hours usually. Whenever a session is completed, the top idea is recommended to REDX Rootalpha. Logistically speaking it is hard to allocate all innovators in one club. So we decided that we will have college wise local chapters to recruit innovators, we are currently closing paperwork to initiate college level REDX innovation clubs. Dr. Raskar who has been aware and mentoring this process at a high level suggested that there should be REDX Labs in the east for technology, management enabling R&D sector to be deeply explored.
AI Center/Lab which was proposed at IISER Kolkata has agreed to host a REDX Lab and has been generously funded by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Initial and FCRA protocols are in progress. Once this is sorted out, labs will be functional in the REDX eastern wing.
Q3: Can you briefly share how you conducted the REDX Spot process for REDX RootAlpha Club?
I was there with Parichay das, for the first session so it can be carried through for subsequent sessions. In the eastern REDX club region, the youngsters initially did not understand the idea behind REDX fully. Everyone was oblivious to its impact, so it was our challenge to help make them aware about the bottom of the pyramid impact (we explain Spot probe session using ideation scrutiny, go to market strategy, market scrutiny). I told Parichay, let’s have one club at your startup RootAlpha. Spot session was initiated and sustained at RootAlpha successfully, hence we decided to move to college campuses as well.
Q4: Describe Spot session. How did you go about choosing a grand opportunity and such?
The first session co-hosted by Rootalpha’s founder Parichay Das and me and our topic of interest included Diabetic Retinopathy (DR). The first day we surveyed how big the retinopathy market which is one of the main causes of blindness is. Then we discussed how to detect them in their early stage. With a mobile camera, when you shine the light, the backscattered light revealed using the cloud computing apps whether there was no DR or if it existed was it mild, moderate or severe stage. We discussed deep learning as it is performance wise scalable (accuracy more than 95%), machine learning is not. Data of the order of 10 power 6 was needed and my mentor Connected Jai Chablani (Sabya’s research collaborator) from LVP Eye Institute provided the data to help us out.
We had 3 groups, each with 4–5 members. Skill matrix matching is not followed in the REDX Spot process in general, but that’s what is used in general to form teams based on the interest and skills matching of mentees. Healthcare was one of the chosen domains (DR and detection of osteoarthritis) based on the interest of people, we came up with the grand opportunity at Rootalpha and another domain was agriculture. The teams were mostly from FB Developer group.
We were fortunate to have mentors guide us on AI ethics. This is very important. I sought mentorship for the REDX projects LV Prasad Eye Institute mentors helped a lot with this and also provided the samples for training. During the creation of the problem canvas, they guided us about how to pre-process data, extract information for atleast 2 projects in the healthcare domain. According to these experts, data acquisition comprises of 30% of total efforts include validation of legal and policy compliance, 50% of the effort is directed to data cleaning, and 20% of the effort is used for the application of deep or machine learning.
Q5: What were your findings from the Resource mapping phase of the REDX Spot process?
During resource mapping, I explained to mentees about the importance of a careful analysis about patenting issues, also helped them approach a suitable mentor for each project, made everyone aware of rules and regulations associated with REDX Spot process, and specifically worked closely with mentors who are engaged with biophotonics. Skills matrix was used to form teams and machine and deep learning was the preferred breakthrough technologies.
In ML performance saturates, but deep learning is more scalable in outcomes. Deep learning is not about mimicking human activity, it is about automating human activity. Scalability happens continuously. So accuracy is nearly 100%.
Intelligence automation was another topic we specifically discussed in the REDX Clubs. In TCS or Cognizant, they use Business Process Automation for doing rigorous excel sheet tasks like sending 20,000 customized emails which is humanly impossible, hence mistakes tend to happen. Robotic Process Automation can enable such tasks, it is a new tool and only 300 experts in India are available in this domain. According to Hindu, this technology will create 22 lakh jobs by 2021.
Secondly, the term robot from the physical world, the software is template driven; we discussed augmenting this software route with intelligence. We are implementing this through AI, with our second REDX AI session. Maybe by 2025 people will have higher adoption in India. We trained FB Developer Circle activities. I am proud to say that we are the only FB Community who has worked on this kind of intelligence automation.
Q6: How did you gauge the impact of your REDX club sessions and buildathons?
Mentees came to our sessions with different goals i.e., jobs, startups, internships, etc. It was a revelation to us to see how they benefited. After completion of REDX projects, IBM has hired innovators/mentees as Data Analysts for their projects. REDX mentees were hired for startups viz., Twelit, and there was another one, both of them hired mentees from the DR project.
Q7: Are these people coming back to REDX Club?
They definitely come back, but we need more REDX clubs and REDX Labs funded by Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
Q8: DR project has the reach and the cost — in the (Findings plot) impact chart. What was the problem statement you came up with?
Our problem statement finally turned out to be: “ Low cost AI based DR detection early stage (to be detected between early and mild stage) prediction and detection” We did not prevention using AI, as it is not part of our application. We targeted early stage detection as it is very difficult for humans to detect it without any aid morphologically, so we need super-human technologies to detect early-stage morphological (sub-micro level changes).
Q9: How has this solution been adopted by the industry…
Kolkota based startups Twelit and EdgeRex and Bengaluru based Biodesign Innovation Lab have adopted this.
Q10: How did Spot process change your perspective on innovation?
REDX provides freedom of thinking, there is no pressure to advance an idea to meet business goals. There is no should and must for showing outcomes, also if something is not working, there is a scope of correcting oneself and help the innovator community to actually understand and focus on the issue.
Most students are confused about how to pursue their career and do not know which technologies may be obsolete by the time they master them. REDX provides exposure to Industry 4.0 standards and gives them a flavor of innovation cycles, also gives them an opportunity to experience the feeling of creating social impact.
REDX community is for passionate people who would like to make a difference. E.g, if you understand industry 4.0 standards and operate, you will know that many technologies are disappearing, wallets have gone digital, also optical fiber probes have been replaced with cell phone cameras.
96% of the people who suffer from cancer or diabetic retinopathy do not have the money to pay for the treatment, imagine creating a low-cost optimal solution and help these people at the bottom of the pyramid. This is the main message which I used to inspire the mentees from our current REDX club and in turn, it is helping create social impact. Growing demand for the clubs has inspired REDX club registrations in many eastern India colleges and also REDX Lab initiatives have shaped up to support innovators to try out something new. As a mentor, I have enabled Google MLCC workshops for mentees as well.
PS: PS: Rethinking Engineering Design Execution (REDX), conceived at MIT Emerging World Group (at MIT Media Lab) is a unique bottom-up co-innovation process consists of SPOT (link to a quick overview here): members of the innovation ecosystem generate an idea that addresses a need; PROBE involves building rough functional proofs of concepts; GROW: all collaborators combine their talent to evolve the prototypes into polished and fully functional devices. LAUNCH phase involves the successful deployment of the fully functional device, usually supported by REDX Lab locations like Digital Impact Square(DISQ), LVP Mitra Lab (more locations can be found here: kumbha.org).
References
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c1e7/fdc88f3495696b37e5be1bbdd8a4dbc1fd11.pdf
