Lecture to explore AI’s use in delivering trees to farmers across rural India

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence (CSRAI) will host Firdaus Ahmed Choudhury, a doctoral student in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State, as part of its Young Achievers Symposium. Choudhury's talk, “From Manual Planning to Automated Routing: Scalable Sapling Distribution for Smallholder Farmers in India,” will discuss an AI-based decision-support system developed to help a nonprofit organization more efficiently distribute saplings to farmers across rural India.

The talk will take place from 3 to 4 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 28, in 401 Eric J. Barron Innovation Hub on the University Park campus and will also be accessible via Zoom. More information is available on the CSRAI website.

According to Choudhury, artificial intelligence and optimization offer significant opportunities to improve how nonprofit organizations allocate limited resources and deliver services to communities, but deploying these methods in real-world settings requires accounting for operational constraints that are often absent from standard problem formulations. His talk will explore these challenges through his work with the Naandi Foundation, a nonprofit that distributes saplings free of charge to smallholder farmers across rural India. Naandi's distribution planning — which involves selecting trucks, allocating saplings and constructing routes across a large rural road network — has historically been performed manually.

Choudhury's broader research focuses on AI for social good, with an emphasis on explainability and the development of human-centered AI and decision-support systems for nonprofit and public-sector organizations, particularly those serving marginalized communities. He received his bachelor's degree in computer science from Penn State. In addition to his work with the Naandi Foundation, he has collaborated with the Paterson, New Jersey Fire Department on data-driven approaches to support fire inspection prioritization. Choudhury is a recipient of the Data Science for Social Good Fellowship and Penn State's AI for Societal Impact Award for his work with the Naandi Foundation.

This talk is part of CSRAI's Young Achievers Symposium, which highlights early career researchers in diverse fields of AI for social impact. CSRAI promotes high-impact, transformative AI research and development, while encouraging the consideration of social and ethical implications in all such efforts. The center supports a broad range of activities from foundational research to the application of AI to all areas of human endeavor.