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Hi, my name is George Abraham and welcome to Eyeway Conversations. My guest today is Karthik Sawhney, who is in the United States, and he works with Microsoft. And he's also one of the cofounders of I-STEM. So Karthik, it's so good to speak to you after a long time. Welcome.
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me on the show. It's been almost a decade that I was last on the show with you. So it's a lot to talk about, and pretty excited to be speaking to you again,
You moved from India to Stanford, that was a big story in India. And so would you like to recount the entire scenario, which led to your relocation from India to the US?
Actually it all started when I was in class 10. And at that time, CBSE, the Central Board of Secondary Education had rules where if you were a blind student, the only classes that you could take were, you can only study commerce or humanities, you couldn't pursue, STEM in 11th and 12th. So that's kind of where all of this started. And so at that time, I had to work with my school, and really try and figure it out with nonprofits and write like a bunch of letters to the chairman of the board, demo how assistive technologies are used, and you know, all that kind of stuff, to get the permission to study science in 11th and 12th. And so, you know, that was kind of the starting. And then later, when I was preparing for engineering, schools and colleges in India, there were a lot of challenges in being able to get the accommodations that I needed to take the exam. Specifically, the issue was that they wanted me to work with a test reader and a writer who had no experience in sciences at all. The idea was to give me someone who was a humanities student. And that was really challenging because there's a lot of specific notation right that we use in STEM and physics and chemistry, especially, you know, in an exam like JEE which is the entrance to IIT, it's not really, you know some random, trivial exam that you go and take. So you need someone who will be able to understand what you're saying and explain you what the question is, by reading the question properly. That was something that was not provided or, you know, I couldn't get them to agree to for a very long time. It was in November of 2012, this was when I was in 12. And that was a time when I realized okay, well, this is not going anywhere. And this is going to be a big risk. Fortunately, I had my aunt living in California, pretty close to Stanford, and also a teacher who was a Fulbright fellow who just returned to India and was talking to me about like, you know, all of the good things in the US and how I'd be able to take advantage of the inclusive education system there, how there is a disability office and all that kind of stuff. And that got me really excited. I still had no plans to go to Stanford until that time. And I was like, hey no, I'll just continue to work to prepare for IITs. But then I was so overwhelmed and depressed about some of the things that happened. And you know, just, you know, me not being able to get anywhere, as far as you know, working with the authorities to reach some sort of a solution that would work for me that I was like, okay well, I'm done with this. And now is the time when I should really seriously start thinking about international admissions. And so I took my standardized tests really really late, hoping that they would still accept it. And yeah that's kind of how I applied to a few universities in the US. Stanford was my first choice. Fortunate to get into that.
Yep. I still remember, you know, when you had just finished your class 12th and you got into very high 90s, and there was a buzz created, and then the disappointment of the JEE, kind of not working for you. But it was wonderful to hear that you managed to get to Stanford with a full scholarship. So what was the kind of experience you had at Stanford? What was the ecosystem like? What was it like studying there?
It was amazing. Amazing not just from an accessibility perspective, like they had a really well staffed, well resource disability office to cater to their students with disabilities known as the office of accessible education. You know, I did not have to type my textbooks for one, which I had to do in 12th. And so I got all of my textbooks in accessible format well before, you know, anything was due. So that was great. I could request tactile diagrams, or people who could explain diagrams to me. I had accommodations for exams, etc. So, you know, in terms of accommodations, it was everything that I could have asked for, it was pretty amazing. But I think, you know, that was really not the highlight, the highlight again is ... what is the highlight for most people who go to Stanford, which is just the community that you are a part of right, everyone is extremely high achieving, extremely ambitious, you have access to opportunities and resources that, you know, like otherwise you couldn't possibly dream of. And it's interesting, right? Like many of these opportunities I can't get now, like you know, now I reach out to people and say hey, I work at Microsoft, or I'm a co founder at I-STEM, we want to talk to you, a lot of times, I would get no responses. When I would say, hey I'm a student at Stanford working on a project, it's almost guaranteed that, you know, people will reply to you and be like, hey yeah, I want to talk to you, and, you know, help you out. I still remember I took a bunch of entrepreneurship classes at Stanford, that's kind of how I got excited about startups, and you know, wanting to do something of my own. And the kinds of mentors that you got, as part of those classes where, like, some of the most well known VCs or venture capitalists, right, like, who does that in the classroom setting. And so those are things that only happen at Stanford that I was very fortunate to be a part of. The professors were amazing. You know, you would realize towards the end of the quarter, the academic quarter, the professor who was teaching you was actually a Nobel Laureate which, I mean, of course, their achievement is great, but also what is even better is just how grounded everyone is, and you know, the willingness everyone has there to help each other out to succeed in whatever way you can. And again, you know, success does not mean one thing, you know, it's not just oh, yeah, you know build a company, which is like trillions of dollars or anything like that. It's like, whatever success means for you, like how can this place help you get where you want to get to. So that was pretty amazing for me to se. Also as an international student who had never lived alone, and being blind. I was, and my parents were very kind of nervous about this. But just the level of support, the awareness around disability on campus, the willingness to talk to you as a person first, and not as a person with a disability. All of that was something that I saw a lot at Stanford, probably much more so than, you know, anywhere in the US after my Stanford experiences as well. So that community was amazing, probably the best community that I've been a part of. And it's actually there that I also started working on some startups during the school as well. And so I use those entrepreneurship classes as a way to basically work on, you know, some ideas that I had in the space of disability where I wanted to have impact. And so for example, back in 2015, I believe, I co founded nextbillion.org, which was a membership platform for people with disabilities in tech, you know, we were able to get a couple of companies on board. And so you know, things like that were very helpful to get like a real world perspective as well, while you were still a student, and could get all the help that you needed.
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I'm sure when you left India, you had certain dreams and aspirations. And when you went through Stanford, those aspirations either would have taken more firm shape or they could have changed. What was it in your case?
So I think it was a little bit of both. So I kind of knew that I wanted to do something in the space of assistive technology. But the way I was thinking about this was more research and I went to Stanford hoping to say the human computer interaction, to explore how we could improve interfaces to be more user friendly for people with disabilities. When I went there, I got very excited about artificial intelligence and entrepreneurship, started to learn a lot more about business. And, you know, by the time I graduated you know, my thing was, I still want to do something in assistive technology, I still want to have a lot of impact. But at the same time, I wanted to, I want to create something that will be a business that can scale. And that is going to be you know, investable as well, right. So ensuring that people understand and our customers, whoever the customers would be for that business, understand the need to invest in that business and invest in what we're providing, as opposed to just thinking about people with disabilities as charity, which often happens, right? So that was kind of a good sort of big change in my mindset that you know, happened at Stanford for me.
When you came towards your last month or the last year, or the final semester at Stanford, what were your professional options and how did Microsoft happen?
So actually, Microsoft happened in my second year at Stanford, and I interned with them. I started out on their accessibility team. And I was working on the narrator, which is Microsoft screen reader. So I joined that team, I worked on that for three months. I ended up getting a return offer that I took to work on Cortana. That was a time when I got excited about AI. And so I wanted to work on a personal assistant and see how I can help it to understand natural language better. And so I worked on natural language processing for Cortana. I then worked at Uber. And so when I graduated, I also did have return offer from Uber, had offers from a couple other companies. But I also did have a return offer from Microsoft to join them full time. And plus, I was actually working on an interesting startup around flight price prediction. And so there were a couple of things going on there. And so at that time, it was, you know, the primary choice for me was, whether I wanted to start something right away, or whether I wanted to wait it out a little bit, and then get some industry experience, get some mentorship, and then kind of do it. And so I thought that the latter was a better option. And so I decided to go with the Microsoft Cortana offer as an FTE as a full time employee while I continue to work on other startups that are on the side, as I was doing it.
You've been with Microsoft for what four or five years now?
For about five years now.
And what has been your trajectory in terms of professional forward movement.
So I started out at Microsoft as a software engineer on the Cortana team. And so I was responsible for apps and services, essentially managing a lot of the backend services for Cortana. And then I decided I wanted to do AI. So I switched to being an artificial intelligence scientist, working on language understanding again, to help Cortana understand our intents you know, our natural language. But then I got this opportunity to work on accessibility innovation. It's the team that manages a program known as the AI for accessibility program. It's a five year $25 million grant program that Microsoft launched in 2018 where we give out grants to organizations, nonprofits, academic institutions, startups, etc for them to work on accessibility, and really push the limits of what's possible using AI and using the kind of technology we have today. And so my role on that team is I lead funding rounds for certain rounds. And so this would be managing writing the RFPs, managing the selection process, managing the portfolio, etc. So, for example, one of the rounds that I led was a low cost assistive technology round where the focus really was on ensuring that assistive technologies can be can be available and are easy to use in a country like India or in Africa, etc. So a big part of my role is that managing that. The other thing is I also do work very closely with Microsoft research and product teams to productize new experiences in the accessibility space using AI. And so, you know, now with for example, ChatGPT being the talk of the town, you know what exactly is possible? And, you know, how do we make sure that we can come up with like interesting scenarios that will empower people with disabilities, but also how do we make sure that the kind of responses that the conversational agent is giving us does not have any ableist slang which is inclusive, right, so both responsible use of AI as well as the use of AI in new ways to create delightful experiences for people with disabilities. That's kind of the other aspect of my role besides the grant making opportunities.
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In India, we talk about, you know, the banking system not being accessible, the net banking having problems, mobile apps having problems. What is the experience in the United States when you use mobile applications and the internet banking and so on or electronic wallets? What is the general experience you've had?
I think it's pretty good. I think most companies try to comply with the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act. And so most of the times you actually have pretty accessible experiences. What is little tricky sometimes is that there are regressions, where, you know, they introduce an update and that update broke accessibility for certain aspects of the app. But then these companies are very receptive and responsive, right so when you send them an email, or you tweet at them saying, hey this is broken, like they take immediate action. And so from a digital accessibility perspective, I have not faced any major issues in the US.
You've started something called I-STEM. Obviously, as the name suggests, it's got to do with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and providing access to that to probably visually impaired people in India and the world. So tell me a little bit about this I-STEM project of yours.
Yeah. So it started out in 2018. It started out as a self advocacy group of blind and low vision people in India and abroad who had pursued STEM or were pursuing STEM at that time. And our goal was to make it easier for others to access resources while also changing the mindset of, you know, the administrators and corporates, the education institutions, and the corporates in the country. And so, we started out with a bunch of events like inclusive hackathons where we would get people with and without disabilities, together to hack on problems. And so you know, they would develop empathy in the process, learn from each other. But then, as part of that, many of the team members would recommend people who are blind, you know, they will refer them for jobs at their company, because they realized how good they were. And, you know, ultimately, you come up with the same end product, even though you might have a different process that you would like you might be using. And so that was something that was pretty good. We also did technical training, programs, mentorship, all that kind of stuff. In 2020, late 2020 or so, we realized that there were certain systemic issues here that we really should be working on and leveraging our own technical background. And so the biggest one was digital accessibility, like how do we make sure that the content is accessible. Especially STEM content, right because, you know, as I said, when I was in 11th, and 12th, I had to type out all of my books myself. And so we have developed an AI powered service that you can use to convert any sort of inaccessible content into accessible formats. Now, you might say, oh well, OCR does that. But this is kind of the challenge we have realized that OCR solutions, extract text, but don't really keep the layout, right. Like, if you have a table in the document, that's all going to be messed up. If you have a multi column document, that's going to be messed up. If you have a header or footer, or if you have a list that is not going to be represented correctly. So what we do is we not only extract the content, but we actually also maintain the layout information, we retain that and expose it in a way that actually makes sense for the user that will be compatible with that assistive technology so that they can go and use it. And so we have a mobile app called I-STEM accessibility solutions on Android. And we also have a portal, a web portal at itemai.com that's I-STEM ai.com that anyone can go to, it's a free service, upload a file and convert it into an accessible format. And you know, get instant results. We are also working with organizations, corporates, etc to help them be more accessible as well in India particularly. We recently launched, for example, an accessibility rating index that covers the current state of accessibility of 10 popular apps in India. And the idea is to engage with these companies and service providers to help them be more accessible for people with disabilities.
So when you work in India, did you also kind of engage with the government and what has been the kind of response from the government?
So the web accessibility solution that we developed was actually a part of the innovation challenge that was organized by the Ministry of Electronics and IT and so it was really good to see the government taking a lot of interest in developing a homegrown kind of accessibility solution that also covers the GIGW, the Guidelines for the Indian Government Websites. Also the most recent event that I was talking about when we launched the rating index for the 10 popular apps, we were fortunate to have the Secretary of the disability division, MSJ, joined us We've been exploring, I've been talking to him about like what's possible. We're also speaking to the Ministry of Education and trying to see how we can get, you know, our content accessibility solution integrated with Deeksha, which is the National School Education portal as well. So it's great to see the government being very open to innovation, and also accessibility.
You know, in recent times, especially in the last three, four weeks, there's a lot of talk about changes and growth in the AI space. And you're talking about bots, and as you mentioned, ChatGPT. And there are several, I was also reading about the lambda a product, which is coming out from Google. So how do you think this is going to impact the bots? I mean, that seems to be the thing of the future. How is bot going to kind of change the way say blind people are going to be educated?
So I think it's going to transform everything. We are already seeing amazing use cases of generative AI, which is basically AI being able to produce texts and you know, have conversations or images or what have you, right. So the way I think about this is that we have an opportunity where we can think about new interfaces, new ways to interact with technology, and new ways to get tasks done. You know, I think gone are the days when we had to figure out how to get a task done. I think AI is getting to a point where we can just give it like high level instructions on what we wanted to accomplish, and it will be able to accomplish it. And so that's particularly helpful when, you know, the task itself has a component that might, for example, be a blocker for someone using an assistive technology. But if the AI is able to understand that task, and you know, help you accomplish that task, and nothing like it, and so very excited about, you know what's possible, very excited about how we can leverage it to create new experiences for people with disabilities. The other thing also is excited about how this can be used to disseminate information that is hard to reach a lot of people with disabilities, right, I mean, not to forget that a substantial number of people with disabilities in our country still probably don't have like the basic level of information about their rights and what not. And of course, you know, helplines, like Eyeway have been extremely helpful. What opportunities we have to scale this information access, as well, so that more and more people can take advantage of it and can get that they need to be successful in life as well. So definitely a lot of potential there as well, very excited about where we're headed.
You know, a lot of technology is being developed and the people who develop these technologies are they mindful that blind and visually impaired people are part of the universe they are working in or working for?
No, they aren't because they're never taught about it, and they don't realize it because they've never interacted with one, right. Accessibility is not a part of any CS curriculum that I'm aware of, except for maybe one or two instances here and there. And so no one really knows about it. It's not that people people don't want to know about it. It's not that people deliberately choose not to make things not accessible because they're like, you know, yeah what's the big deal if, you know, I don't make it accessible to blind and low vision, that's not really the point. But like, how do you even learn about it, right? Like how do they know that they have to think about, you know, a specific needs and, you know, do things differently to make sure that that is accessible to everyone, like people don't even know about what screen leaders are. So let alone what CAG and you know, other things like that. It's hard. But I think there's also another problem, right, which is we can't expect everyone to go and read CAG that's not happening. We can't expect everyone to go and read all of these training manuals, right? Like, it's just not going to happen. And so how do you make sure that you know, when you do have the opportunity, like co pilot, GitHub, or ChatGPT, or other ways in which you're able to provide feedback to or maybe even just as simple as linters, which, you know, essentially, you can get feedback on the accessibility of your code as you're coding. If you're able to provide this feedback using technology, I think that's the way to go. Otherwise, getting down from that 97% inaccessible to 0% inaccessible, I mean, you know, that's really hard.
You've come a long way since say 2012. How's the family kind of responded to you?
It's been amazing obviously, they're super happy at how everything is shaped up. Obviously wouldn't have been possible without their support, right like throughout my school days and what not right and even now, of course, you know, you have this very strong support system behind you that lets you take risks, that lets you kind of do what you want to do and so very fortunate that way but you know, they're pretty happy about how things have shaped up as well.
Great. It's wonderful talking to you Kartik as always and wish you the very best.
Thank you so much for having me on the show.
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