Tara Chklovksi, Anshita Saini on Technovation Pioneering AI Education for Innovation - Ep. 245

Hello, and welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. On 10/17/2024, NVIDIA was honored to host the Technovation World Summit finalist pitch and awards ceremony in Santa Clara, California. The summit featured more than 50 young innovators from around the world pitching tech solutions for sustainable development goals, And it was a celebration of what happens when the creativity and resilience of girls meets the transformative power of technology. Here to talk about the World Summit, Technovation, and the incredible work young women are doing across the globe to tackle our biggest problems are Tara Chuklowski and Anshita Sani. Tara is the founder of Technovation and a repeat guest on the podcast, which I'm terribly excited about. We'll get into that in a second. And Anshita is an alumna of Technovation and currently works as a member of the technical staff at OpenAI, an AI company some of you might have heard of. Tara, Anshita, thank you so much for taking the time to join the podcast. Welcome. Congratulations on the awards summit. That was a few months ago. So I hope your New Years are off to a great start, and welcome. Thank you, Noah. NVIDIA has been such a long term supporter of Technovation that I'm so happy to be back and so happy to share our stories along with an alumna we are super proud of, Anjita. Well, I am, like I said, Tara, I'm thrilled to get to talk to you again, and I'm equally thrilled to meet you, Anshita, and to hear about the work you've been doing. But let's start, Tara. You were on the show about five years ago. Time flies. At that time, you were the founder of a nonprofit called Iridescent. You were described we we use this quote from somebody else, not our words. But you were being described as a pioneer empowering the incredible tech girls of the future. Seems like prescient words. What have you been up to since then? And how did it all, lead to now to starting Technovation and us getting to talk to you again? Yeah. Thank you. I think I sort of see Iridescent initially. That was the name of the organization, the nonprofit that I started almost nineteen years ago with the goal to empower underrepresented communities with the skills that they could be the innovators of technologies that solve the problems they face so they didn't have to wait for a savior. And so I think when NVIDIA first supported us back in 2018, I could sense that AI was going to be the most powerful revolutionary force. And it was interesting. Like, we started to do that actually in 2016, and I was talking to people, and I was like, we need to revamp our curriculum to focus on AI, and nobody was talking about that, especially not in the education space. And everybody would be like, AI and underserved communities don't go in the same …