The INK Fellows U.S. Tour will take the INK Fellows Program to the hotspots of American innovation, bringing exposure on both sides
See Program Details
Dr. Vivek Nair had stumbled upon a process to convert carbon emissions into carbon nanotubes (a material stronger than steel). His discovery led him to start a company focused on automating this process and turning carbon emission into a useable resource for many applications. Vivek was named one of the today’s disruptors and tomorrow’s brightest stars by Forbes “30 under 30” list,for the year 2012 & MIT Technology Review outstanding innovators under 35, for the year 2012.He has also received the National award for meritorious invention from NRDC, Gov. of India. Vivek has also been named by Tehelka as “Tipping point – Architects of the Future”, for the year 2012. He was also the winner of Ashoka/Staples Social Youth Entrepreneur award. In addition, Vivek is a double doctorate from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore & Loughborough University, UK .
WEBSITE: cleancarbontechnologies.com
Elishai is the principle investigator of the Neuro & Biomorphic Engineering Lab (NBEL-lab.com) and an Assistant Professor at the Open University of Israel. In his research, Elishai studies the realm of brain-inspired machines, using artificial brains to develop new frameworks for robotics and vision processing. He is also the founding director of NBEL Innovation Workshops at Biohouse, Hadassah Medical Center — a design and engineering company which integrates computer-aided design, electrical and software engineering to develop novel medical solutions.
Elishai is an academic consultant at the Weizmann Institute of Science for Computational Neuroscience and a university lecturer for artificial intelligence, mathematical modelling, software engineering and computational biology. He is a graduate of Singularity University (2012, NASA Ames Research Center, California), INK fellow (2013, India), INK Trailblazer (2014, USA), Aeroli.to speaker (2016, Brazil), and Dean fellow for Neuroscience (2018, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel). Elishai Holds degrees in Life sciences (B.Sc), Philosophy and History (B.A), Computer Science (M.Sc), Bioengineering (M.Sc, PhD) and Computational Neuroscience (Post Doc).
Joi Barua is a musician from Assam, India who fell in love with music at the age of four, after his father gifted him a violin. Growing up, his town had one piano and no music teachers, and his father had to cross the border and get him a keyboard from Bhutan. Since then, Joi has been making waves in the advertising, music, and film circuit in Mumbai with his musical stylings and melodious voice. He is also the lead vocalist of the band Joi and has a mixed musical style incorporating elements of rock, soul, jazz, folk and world music.
Madhumita Halder is the founder of MadRat Games, creators of the World’s first Indian Language word game – Aksharit (www.aksharit.com). She graduated in Computer Science from IIT Bombay and being an artist at heart, worked for a FX studio. However her creative energies not finding room for expression in the corporate world, she chose to work with children. She subsequently taught middle school children at an alternate education center for 4 years.
She explored science through games, play and activities with the children. That’s when the tremendous potential that Play had in learning became abundantly clear. With the vision to unleash this potential that Play holds to engage learners through fun, she co-founded MadRat Games. Their flagship game Aksharit is now ready in 11 major Indian Languages and has been adopted by more than 2500 schools across the country. Nokia, Intel and Google have partnered with MadRat Games and launched Aksharit on half a million devices.
PERSONAL JOURNEY
By my first job I had everything that I had learnt is needed for contentment, yet I felt lost and a search for my purpose in life began. As the question became intense, disillusionment grew and at this time a friend advised me to read the Bhagwad Geeta (which honestly sounded clichéd then) and it talked about how our self brings in emotions and prejudices to our sensory experiences and I knew a switch in me had turned on. I suddenly saw the world for what it was, the societal conditioning dropped and my exploration began.
WEBSITE: MadRatGames
WORKS
Madhumita writes the Science column called My Toy Factory for the HOOT, which is the largest children’s magazine in India
Shankar Tucker is an American-born clarinetist and composer who creates music that explores contemporary and traditional Indian sounds. He collaborates with other musicians to represent new generation Indian artists – bringing their music to an internationally and culturally diverse audience, both on- and offline.
WEBSITE: shankartucker.com
Shilo Shiv Suleman is an Indian illustrator, animator and visual artist based in the city of Bangalore. Her primary area of interest is visual storytelling through multiple mediums. She illustrated her first book for children at the age of 16 and has illustrated eight others since with some of the most well known publishing houses in India. She has also been actively involved in setting up community art projects and collectives that get people to appreciate and create street art in their surroundings as well as use art and design to bring socially relevant issues in India to the forefront.
She is currently working on creating interactive narratives for children on the iPad called Khoya, an experiment with the links between magic, earth and technology as well as the potential that touch has as a new integral part of storytelling. It attempts to use new and mobile technologies like Augmented Reality and the iPad to bring out the fantasy in an Indian contemporary story and create interactions that make you actively seek out natural environments.
Earlier this year she was chosen by TED and Levi’s as an ambassador of the shape of things to come – one of three Indian women to be felicitated with this honour at the TED Global Conference 2011, Edinburgh. In 2010 she was selected for an INK Fellowship for her work as a young innovator in her field and now continues her work with the INK community.
In her spare time Shilo gypsies around the country, driven by Love, magical realism and everything that shimmers, pressing flowers between the pages of her many notebooks while losing herself in watercolor wonderlands.
WEBSITE
Samples of her work are available at http://www.shiloshivsuleman.com
Sunil’s goal is to help Indians bridge the ‘language’ and ‘digital’ divides, due to the dominance of English on the internet and in technical published texts. He has developed digital dictionaries for mobile phones and computers with a repository of 9.6 million audio and textual words in 16 domains, like Legal, Agriculture and Pharmacy, in 22 different Indian languages. Educated in Marathi-medium in a village near Nashik, Sunil believes the root of the rural inferiority complex is the linguistic divide, due to which many abandon their education. He hopes to reverse this with his free platform
By the age of 25, Varun Agarwal was already a filmmaker, entrepreneur and the bestselling author of ‘How I braved Anu Aunty & Co-founded A Million Dollar Company’. He is the co-founder of Alma Mater, India’s biggest college apparel/memorabilia company, and also the co-founder of Reticular, a social media marketing firm. The pursuit of his interests brought about collaborations with A.R. Rahman, Preity Zinta, and many others.
Vicky Roy ran away from home as child and became a ragpicker to earn pocket money. He found refuge at a NGO for street children where he met a photographer that changed his life. Despite his turbulent past, Vicky pursed his passion for photography in which he was selected to photo document the reconstruction of the World Trade Center in NYC. Today, Vicky focuses on helping the disadvantaged by giving them a voice through his photography.
WEBSITE: vickyroyphotography.com
