Architect at Nvidia
Member of the SETI Institute Council of Advisors.
An internationally-recognized expert in AI, Siddha Ganju makes cars drive themselves, optimizes medical instruments and maps distant meteors in the night sky. At NVIDIA, she leads teams working on optimizations for medical instruments and life sciences companies.
Shortly after graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in 2017, she was inducted into Frontier Development Labs (NASA's AI accelerator) as a machine learning lead, for SETI’s CAMS project. She developed meteor detection with AI to automate the recognition, tracking and discovery of meteor showers for CAMS. When it was a manual task, scientists were lucky to get data from a single location, a few nights per year. Now, data flows in from multiple locations every night, and an AI system adjusts for variables that can affect the visual data. Additionally, by growing interest in citizen scientists globally, the network of cameras in this project has now increased six-fold, in multiple new countries, and thus detected the highest number of meteors in NASA’s 63-year history, soon after its release. She also led development of a web portal to track meteor activity globally. The quick turnaround time ultimately led to the discovery of multiple meteor showers and the first-ever instrumental evidence of the Grigg-Mellish comet.
Siddha sees her contribution as both refining computer vision acumen and applying it to new problems. Siddha’s goal is to create advanced, socially responsible applications and help grow the next generation of scientists. She has co-authored a textbook on AI and mentors high school and college students during hackathons. She sponsors competitions and community networks like SpaceML, which she co-founded. She’s also a mentor and supporter of the CMU-sponsored Learn-to-Race challenge, which encourages safe, autonomous driving.