In my last post, I announced the start of the PCC funded “AI for Good Pilot Project” at the UMN office in Kathmandu (Thapathali). We have changed the name of the project to: “AI for Poverty Reduction in Rural Nepal” to make it more descriptive of what we are trying to accomplish. A big first […]

Lora writing. I had this blog partially written when on Thursday night (Kathmandu time, only 48 hours ago) before I had a chance to finish and share it, I received a phone call that my mother, Gloria, had died. My mom was 71 and was in seemingly good health. The call was as unexpected as […]

Mitch writing. Elections were held in Nepal and everything went smoothly. Election day itself and the following days of vote counting were quite uneventful. The party that won biggest, in an unprecedented (for Nepal’s short history of democracy) landslide, was the RSP, which billed itself as the party of change. Interestingly, in the previous election, […]

“Can AI help to alleviate poverty in the remote rural areas of Nepal where UMN works? Can it be used as a tool for good? A pilot project at UMN aims to begin to answer those questions. With the help of a Nepali software engineer, UMN will seek to design and build AI Assistants (Agents) […]