Praveen Pankajakshan is the Chief AI Scientist at UrbanKisaan, leading effort to leverage Satellite Imaging, Computer Vision and AI for agriculture. UrbanKisaan is YC backed and recognized as a Scientific and Industrial Research Organization focused on both indoor and outdoor farming. Previously, he created and led the AI Lab at Cropin, the Data Science and Machine Learning team at Corteva Agriscience (formerly Dow-DuPont Agriculture) in Hyderabad.

He was the first Data Analytics Scientist at Shell Technology Center Bangalore and also worked as a Researcher and Technical Manager at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT). He was a visiting researcher at Harvard University, where he contributed to understanding food security and nutrition in Madagascar, and serves on the committee of the AWS-Impact Computing Project at Harvard Data Science Initiative. He is supporting the Ministry of Education, Government of India, in establishing the four AI Centers of Excellence. He serves as an adjunct faculty member at AMMACHI Labs, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, guiding Master’s and Ph.D. students and he is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Praveen holds a Ph.D. in Control, Signal, and Image Processing from Ariana, a joint research team of INRIA, CNRS, and UNS; a Master’s in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University; and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee. He was a postdoctoral contractual researcher at the Pasteur Institute, Paris. Outside of work, Praveen is passionate about biodiversity, and follows natural and organic farming practices at his own farm. He is a certified Heartfulness Meditation trainer, integrating it into his personal and professional life.