Bishesh Khanal is the founding director and research scientist at NAAMII, Nepal’s leading AI research institute. He completed his PhD in 2016 from INRIA, France, and then spent two years as a post-doctoral researcher at King's College London and Imperial College London, UK. As the world heads into an AI era, he strongly believes that it needs multidisciplinary AI Centers of Excellences (AICEs) in the Global South. These AICEs should contribute to solving big challenges in the Global South through scientific research and innovation, enable their respective countries to strongly participate rather than be mere followers on the global narrative of AI and its relations to the human societies, and help entrepreneurs and industries of the Global South harness the tremendous financial opportunities offered by the emerging global market dynamics.
Bishesh moved back to Nepal in 2019 with the goal of establishing NAAMII as one of the prominent AICEs in the Global South. He has a strong interest in strengthening Nepal's scientific research and innovation capabilities. He is a founder of https://abhinavnepal.com; and co-founder, ex-executive member, and member of National Young Academy of Nepal (NAYAN). He has served as a member in various committees formed by the government of Nepal related to Science and Innovation policies. He has delivered more than hundred talks in various countries across the globe. He has co-organized multiple international conferences and workshops across the globe, and international summer/winter AI schools in Nepal.
As a scientist, Bishesh leads a research group TransfOrming global health with Artificial Intelligence (TOGAI) that has been working on pushing the boundaries of AI and leveraging them to solve some of the important health challenges in the Global South. His research work spans developing affordable low-cost medical imaging AI technologies; introduce AI-powered task-shifting to scale accessibility of health services in primary and community health centers; develop local language AI solutions to improve information and services access at scale; and explore novel methods for trustworthy and affordable AI methods to enable the development or implementation of target applications in LMICs. He has more than 12 years of experience and more than 50 peer-reviewed research articles in top-tier international venues. Some of these research articles are the first time ever from Nepal to be published in these top-tier venues. He has trained and mentored PhD students in the UK and US, many researchers at NAAMII, and several senior engineers of one of Nepal’s biggest AI-as-a -service companies. He serves as an advisor of an international research initiative on “Fairness of AI in Medical Imaging” (https://faimi-workshop.github.io/). He is involved in three different tech start-ups.