RICHA RAJ An AI Maven Making Technology Accessible, Affordable & User-Friendly To Unprivileged People
Richa Raj
CEO & Managing Director
The chauvinistic view in India that tech wizardry is not elected by women as their career has completely vanished over the recent years. This change in perception is indeed due to the fact that many Indian women are pioneering across a gamut of industries by leveraging the best of their prowess in global technologies. Richa Raj(CEO & Managing Director, Ritzy Technology) is one such tech maestro, award winning scientist and researcher aspiring to redefine technology in a more user-friendly manner and make it accessible to not just educated professionals, but even to laymen in India. While most of the unprivileged people in India perceive technology to be an unduly complex entity, Richa through her research-based company ‘Ritzy Technology’ is providing them intelligent machines and applications at the lowest prices possible, thereby establishing the concept that technology is easing our lives greatly. These applications are indeed fuelling the learning process through practical means across schools and colleges so that students can comprehend multiple aspects on a real-time standpoint and remember it for a longer time. In the quest of beholding a complete literate and educated India, Richa also started many classes, small get-togethers and campaigns especially for rural women. For her works in educational empowerment and AI, she was awarded ‘The Icon of Pune 2017’wherein she stood as the youngest recipient among thepanel of achievers from Maharashtra.
Basically oriented across Artificial Intelligence(AI),Ritzy Technology is engaged in seamless research,in-house patents and Machine
Learning(ML) based machines and applications. Staying abreast of the
advancements in the technical space across both domestic and international platforms, the firm is focused on enhancing its current AI portfolio with Augmented Reality(AR), Virtual Reality (VR and other technologies. Also, it has future plans of expanding into Hong Kong, Japan and Germany besides heavily recruiting intellectual people from all over India.
The following excerpts of an exclusive conversation of Richa with CEO Insights will illuminate you further on Richa’s unparalleled finesse across AI and her excellence in building Ritzy Technology.
From an engineering student,how did you evolve as the Founder& CEO of a reputed research based company?
Creating new modules and projects was always at the core of my interests since school days. During the second year of engineering, I successfully built an automated cloth making machine which was funded by Orion, a Japan-based company. This invention coupled with a few others in fact propelled me to set foot into the realm of manufacturing and eventually lay the foundation for Ritzy Technology in Pune. My family has always been very supportive of my works and I've been blessed to have the right mentors in the beginning days of my entrepreneur career. Young age on the other hand has been a bit thwarting in our society as it is a struggle to be taken seriously among more qualified and extensively successful older men around. Moreover, we at Ritzy always aimed at encouraging the budding engineers, doctors, other graduates and tech-savvy people with our variegated innovations across new streams of business and not just be a regular profit oriented company.
What is your stance towards making technology accessible to the unprivileged people of India and their educational empowerment?
Presently, the unprivileged people in India are greatly disinclined to use applications with high-end technologies rather than choosing the ones that can facilitate their business. But at Ritzy, we are striving to elucidate them that technologies like AI are not just capable of resolving high-end, complex issues but also executing simple and basic tasks like farming, weather forecasting or understanding paedogenesis. This
advancements in the technical space across both domestic and international platforms, the firm is focused on enhancing its current AI portfolio with Augmented Reality(AR), Virtual Reality (VR and other technologies. Also, it has future plans of expanding into Hong Kong, Japan and Germany besides heavily recruiting intellectual people from all over India.
The following excerpts of an exclusive conversation of Richa with CEO Insights will illuminate you further on Richa’s unparalleled finesse across AI and her excellence in building Ritzy Technology.
From an engineering student,how did you evolve as the Founder& CEO of a reputed research based company?
Creating new modules and projects was always at the core of my interests since school days. During the second year of engineering, I successfully built an automated cloth making machine which was funded by Orion, a Japan-based company. This invention coupled with a few others in fact propelled me to set foot into the realm of manufacturing and eventually lay the foundation for Ritzy Technology in Pune. My family has always been very supportive of my works and I've been blessed to have the right mentors in the beginning days of my entrepreneur career. Young age on the other hand has been a bit thwarting in our society as it is a struggle to be taken seriously among more qualified and extensively successful older men around. Moreover, we at Ritzy always aimed at encouraging the budding engineers, doctors, other graduates and tech-savvy people with our variegated innovations across new streams of business and not just be a regular profit oriented company.
What is your stance towards making technology accessible to the unprivileged people of India and their educational empowerment?
Presently, the unprivileged people in India are greatly disinclined to use applications with high-end technologies rather than choosing the ones that can facilitate their business. But at Ritzy, we are striving to elucidate them that technologies like AI are not just capable of resolving high-end, complex issues but also executing simple and basic tasks like farming, weather forecasting or understanding paedogenesis. This
way, we are making AI accessible to them through our applications at affordable prices.
With aspirations for education empowerment, we have been working on an e-Scanner cum Translator–'E-Sanskrit' that can let even the uneducated people across remote villages, access any complex device and understand any language. Through associations with universities at India and Hong Kong, we have also formulated other softwares for mobile phones and computers which posses the potential to make learning more productive and practical among the rural populace. Furthermore, we are currently working on a solar energy-powered book vending machine that can collect old books and dispense it at very cheap prices in remote villages.
Could you cast some light on how you impart the skills of research and innovation to your employees?
Firstly, we recruit people based on both their EQ and IQ because they need to be endowed with the knack and patience to read, research and understand relentlessly about diverse concepts. Besides letting the team contribute their ideas at the idea board, we constantly engage them with recreational practical experiments regarding VR application, interactive seminars and visualization of problem solving approach to research and innovate beyond the edge.
What would be your advice for today’s millennials to attain their goals?
It is easier to work when you are passionate about it. By avoiding procrastination and focusing on certain imperative elements, millennials achieve beyond their charted goals. I personally suggest people suffering from procrastination to read 'The 5Second Rule' by Mel Robbins. Besides, women and men should create their own wellness regimes accordingly to maintain their health and well being. In fact,a regular dose of 'me-time' is very important to people akin to the job-time especially in the field of startups.
Offerings:
Research in Applied Science,Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Innovation, Product Engineering, Research Engineering, Virtual Reality& Augmented Reality – Applications and Softwares, Embedded Design, & Arduino
Offices: Pune,Delhi& Hong Kong
With aspirations for education empowerment, we have been working on an e-Scanner cum Translator–'E-Sanskrit' that can let even the uneducated people across remote villages, access any complex device and understand any language. Through associations with universities at India and Hong Kong, we have also formulated other softwares for mobile phones and computers which posses the potential to make learning more productive and practical among the rural populace. Furthermore, we are currently working on a solar energy-powered book vending machine that can collect old books and dispense it at very cheap prices in remote villages.
Could you cast some light on how you impart the skills of research and innovation to your employees?
Firstly, we recruit people based on both their EQ and IQ because they need to be endowed with the knack and patience to read, research and understand relentlessly about diverse concepts. Besides letting the team contribute their ideas at the idea board, we constantly engage them with recreational practical experiments regarding VR application, interactive seminars and visualization of problem solving approach to research and innovate beyond the edge.
What would be your advice for today’s millennials to attain their goals?
It is easier to work when you are passionate about it. By avoiding procrastination and focusing on certain imperative elements, millennials achieve beyond their charted goals. I personally suggest people suffering from procrastination to read 'The 5Second Rule' by Mel Robbins. Besides, women and men should create their own wellness regimes accordingly to maintain their health and well being. In fact,a regular dose of 'me-time' is very important to people akin to the job-time especially in the field of startups.
Offerings:
Research in Applied Science,Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Innovation, Product Engineering, Research Engineering, Virtual Reality& Augmented Reality – Applications and Softwares, Embedded Design, & Arduino
Offices: Pune,Delhi& Hong Kong