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Tathagato Rai Dastidar

Founder and CEO at SigTuple

Tathagato Rai Dastidar, often referred to as "Tatha," is the Founder and CEO of SigTuple, a company focused on leveraging machine learning in the healthcare sector. With over 22 years of experience in the technology industry, he has a strong academic background, holding both a B.Tech and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.12

Career Highlights

  • SigTuple Technologies: Dastidar co-founded SigTuple in 2015 and has held various roles including Chief Scientific Officer and CEO. The company aims to apply AI to medical diagnostics, enhancing healthcare delivery through innovative technology solutions.13
  • Previous Roles: Prior to SigTuple, he worked at notable companies such as:
    • Yahoo!: As Engineering Manager, he contributed to multimedia search technologies.
    • American Express: Served as Director in Big Data Labs, focusing on data architecture and analytics.
    • Gracenote/Tribune Digital Ventures: Worked on machine learning applications for media technologies.12

Contributions and Innovations

Dastidar has been instrumental in developing various technologies, including:

  • A distributed implementation of the Fisherfaces face recognition algorithm on Hadoop.
  • Systems for automatic highlight generation from sports videos.
  • Machine learning frameworks for image and speech classification.1

His entrepreneurial journey reflects a commitment to advancing technology in critical sectors, particularly healthcare, through innovative applications of artificial intelligence.

Highlights

Apr 14 · linkedin

Hey LazyPay and PayU: You are harassing people!

Here’s the story. A person close to me, received a message from LazyPay a few days ago, with an OTP to link her account with bigbasket.com. She never had a LazyPay account, and never pays for BigBasket purchases with LazyPay. She tries contacting LazyPay customer care, but that doesn’t work. So, where did LazyPay get her number from?

Right after that, she gets two other messages showing transactions done on BigBasket using LazyPay. Amounts/date/time don’t match any purchases she made, and purchase history on BigBasket confirms that.

After this, she gets another message notifying her of a “due date” for payment to LazyPay.

The fun starts now. For the last 10+ days, every half hour or so, she gets a call from LazyPay asking her to pay up. Calls from new numbers every time, so even blocking isn’t an option. Calls come on Saturdays at 10PM, Sunday afternoons, and all sorts of odd hours. This is accompanied by a barrage of messages. Every few days, a “penalty” gets added to her “dues”.

Fun fact: None of the callers know her name, only her number and the “due amount”. So, LazyPay – you deal with nameless customers with only a phone number?

These are unethical practices on your part, LazyPay. Hope you are listening! This needs to stop now! Please DM me to get the details.

Sep 27 · linkedin

The journey of AI into healthcare, unlike many other fields, has been cautious at best. For good reasons, too. We are dealing with human lives here, and an error of the AI can potentially end in results that impact health outcomes. Regulatory authorities worldwide have also followed this cautious approach. Limit the role of AI to be an assistant. Not more.

We at SigTuple figured this out long ago. There are a few fundamental principles we have always followed in our product design. Make AI generated decisions transparent, explainable, and most importantly, overridable by a human. And never ever try to take the human out of the loop. All our products follow this philosophy.

Today I am happy to announce that our first product – the AI100 (automated digital microscope), combined with Shonit (AI for review of peripheral blood smear samples) has recently been cleared by the US Food and Drug Agency (FDA) under the 510(k) route. FDA is one of the most stringent medical regulatory authorities in the world. A clearance from the FDA quite literally means the world to us: This stamp of approval is highly regarded in practically every country in the world.

This wasn’t easy. 4 clinical studies at 4 different sites including in the US, with 800+ samples. Then a stupendous amount of documentation. The excess load on the FDA reviewers due to so many COVID related submissions meant that the review process got delayed way beyond the expected timeline. But perseverance paid off in the end. We got the approval. Not just the approval, but in the process we gained a huge wealth of experience on navigating the regulatory pathway. This will help us immensely as we take more and more AI driven products through the approvals process. It should also help ease the regulatory pathway for other companies building AI enabled diagnostic products.

While this is not the first product to obtain the FDA approval from India, it is definitely the first integrated hardware and AI product, and the first product in AI assisted digital microscopy to have achieved this milestone from India. Even globally, FDA approvals for AI assisted digital microscopy have been few and far between. We thus join an elite league. Moment of immense pride for us at SigTuple. A huge shout out to the team!

I also take this opportunity to thank all those who have been part of this journey – our clinical partners (Believers Church Medical College Hospital, HealthCare Global, Aria Diagnostics, Father Muller Medical College Hospital and others), and our advisors for FDA (Dr. Jinjie Hu, Mukesh Kumar, PhD, RAC, SYNCORP Clinical Research).

Onwards and upwards!

Apurv Manjrekar, Kundan Kumar, Pranat Bhadani

#AIforhematology #FDACleared #AIforpathology #MadeForTheWorld #AIforhealthcare

Related Questions

What inspired Tathagato Rai Dastidar to start SigTuple?
What are some of the key technologies developed by SigTuple under Tathagato's leadership?
How did Tathagato's experience at Yahoo and American Express influence his approach at SigTuple?
What challenges did Tathagato face while founding SigTuple?
Can you provide examples of SigTuple's applications in healthcare?
Tathagato Rai Dastidar
Tathagato Rai Dastidar, photo 1
Tathagato Rai Dastidar, photo 2
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Location

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India