Sreya Francis, an artificial intelligence (AI) innovator from Cherthala, won the AIconics Solutions Implementer of the Year award at the AI Summit held in New York earlier this week.

• The prize is given to individuals who have developed in-house innovation and successfully implemented AI to drive meaningful change and business growth for their brand.
• Ms. Francis, who works as head of technical innovation at Farm Mutual Re in Ontario, Canada, emerged as the winner beating a line-up of five shortlisted AI innovators.
• “Sreya has a unique blend of excellence in core and applied AI research, industrial innovation, and technical leadership. She invented one of the very first approaches to merge distributed machine learning, causal machine learning, and blockchain to decentralise AI, and proposed and developed the very first implementation of ‘Causal Federated Learning’ that has been adopted by top research labs and industries worldwide,” reads a statement published on the website of the AI Summit New York.
• It noted that she led multiple projects in AI and Robotics. She has given talks at numerous international conferences and mentored several young women in AI.
• Before the Alconics award, Ms. Francis received multiple accolades including the prestigious Microsoft Research Diversity award twice.