Harry Aravind

India doesn't need to lead the world in building the most advanced AI models. But it must lead in ensuring benefits of AI are widely shared. @rvenk and I have an op-ed in The @EconomicTimes economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/et-com…

For the last three years, a startup in Bangalore has been obsessed with a pursuit that typically invites raised eyebrows, naked skepticism, and accusations of stealing from sci-fi: @dognosis is training dogs to detect cancer. And until you've spent time at their facility - a former pomegranate farm in the outskirts of Bangalore - perhaps skepticism is the rational response. But Dognosis isn't betting on some pie-in-the-sky idea or some charming novelty act, they're betting on evolution. @akadogluk and @Itamar_Bitan based their company on the fact that the dog's nose - a product of fifteen millennia of co-evolution with humans - can detect the faint chemical trace of cancer in your breath at a resolution that our machines, algorithms, and laboratory tests have never come close to matching. We've known this fact for decades. We've consistently failed to do anything meaningful with that knowledge. The missing link has been figuring out what the dog's nose knows, and applying it in a standardised, scalable, and clinically validated way. Dognosis is building this missing piece of the equation i.e. the translation layer that allows the dog's nose to speak a language medicine can understand, enabling us to harness an ancient biological intelligence and plug it into our modern medical infrastructure. Maybe you've read the paragraphs above and retained your skepticism. That's fair. But this past Friday, the Journal of Clinical Oncology - the world's most influential cancer journal - opted to make life much harder for the skeptics. On Friday, the JCO published Dognosis' landmark study on breath-based multi-cancer detection - the largest of its kind ever conducted - showing that a team of trained dogs, equipped with sensors and AI, could detect multiple cancers from breath alone at 90%+ accuracy - including at Stage I, when it matters most - for $2 a test. According to Akash, it proved "that everything we’ve known about the dogs is true". Needless to say, it's a genuine milestone for Indian healthcare, health-tech, deep-tech, and, uh, dog-tech, that deserves far more attention than it's gotten so far. To help change that, we were lucky to have Akash stop by the Tigerfeathers editorial desk this past week to unpack the Dognosis journey - helping us understand what they're building, how they're doing it, why it matters, and what comes next. From where we're sitting, Dognosis is an n-of-1 Indian startup with an n-of-1 story that everyone in the Indian tech ecosystem should be aware of. If you've been intrigued by what you've read so far and you're keen to go deeper, dive into our piece here👇 tigerfeathers.in/p/dognosis-unl…

Air India, IndiGo and SpiceJet have told the government that the country's airline industry is under extreme stress and on the verge of "stopping operations", as they sought revision in ATF pricing and financial support. thehindu.com/news/national/…