Neil S. Gaikwad, Maharashtra, India
Co-chair MIT India Conference, 2019
Lead, Conference content and agenda strategy

Neil Gaikwad is a doctoral researcher and an MIT arts scholar, specializing in human-centered artificial intelligence for socio-economic development.

One of his main goals for the MIT India Conference 2019 is to create an inclusive platform to celebrate diversity in science, technology, culture, and economics, while developing actionable strategies to tackle pressing societal challenges through MIT’s “Mens et manus” philosophy. For the MIT India Conference 2019 conference he took initiative and lead to invite Arundhati Katju (Lawyer on LGBTQ+ Rights Movement in India), Anil Kumar Gupta (Founder, the Honey Bee Grassroots Network, Professor IIM-A), Priyamvada Natarajan (Astrophysicist, Science Educator, Professor at Yale University), Raghuram Rajan (Economist and Former RBI Governor) Manjul Bhargava (Professor at Princeton, Fields Medalist), Indrani Medhi Thies (Microsoft Scientist and Technologist), Sanjiv Mehta (Chairman and Managing Director Hindustan Unilever Limited), Manasi Kirloskar (Executive Director and CEO, Kirloskar Systems Limited), and Abigail Francis, (Assistant Dean of LBGT Services at the Division of Student Life, MIT)

Neil develops human-AI collaboration algorithms and tools to study, model, and (re-) design just socio-technical systems, analyzing large-scale datasets emerging from social processes, Earth remote sensing satellites, and socio-economic interactions. His doctoral research advances satellite powered precision agriculture to help prevent farmers’ suicides, and is a part of the MIT’s Quest for Intelligence, an institute-wide initiative that aims to unlock the nature of intelligence and harness it to make a better world. Neil’s research is informed by experiences in academia, quantitative finance on Wall Street, and farming communities in the Western Ghats of India (Sahyadri). 

Neil’s research has been published in top-tier artificial intelligence conferences and featured in the New York Times, Bloomberg, WIRED, and the Wall Street Journal. His photography artwork has been published in National Geographic. Some of his honors include Facebook Research Fellow, MIT Graduate Teaching award, IJCAI Distinguished Program Committee Member, ACM UIST Honorable Mention, and MIT Arts Scholar.