The worlds problems are overwhelming and it’s going to take all of us to solve them
Empowering social entrepreneurs to create sustainable solutions for the world’s most pressing challenges
Social Impact Studio.ai
is a socially driven enterprise that harnesses the energy of youth, wisdom of experienced professionals, and methodologies of the startup ecosystem to tackle global challenges, guided by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). By cultivating diverse collaboration and harnessing the power of AI, the studio fosters a vibrant environment for developing innovative and impactful social enterprises.
Vision
We empower a global community to turn innovative ideas into real-world solutions, tackling the world’s most pressing challenges and creating a brighter future together.
Empowering Success
The platform provides a comprehensive framework for success, combining the methodologies of Silicon Valley startups with expert guidance on business strategy, revenue models, and ROI optimization. This enables social entrepreneurs to build thriving, sustainable enterprises that drive positive social impact and generate long-term value.
Amplifying Impact with AI
The platform leverages the power of AI to unlock data-driven insights, driving informed decision-making and strategic growth for social enterprises. By harnessing the potential of machine learning, natural language processing, and predictive analytics, we empower entrepreneurs to optimize their operations, identify new opportunities, and amplify their social impact.
Fostering Human Connections
The platform prioritizes human connections, creating an inclusive and supportive community that encourages knowledge exchange, collaboration, and mutual support. This vibrant ecosystem fosters meaningful relationships, promotes a sense of belonging, and inspires hope by showcasing the tangible impact of collective action.
Integrating Nature-Based Solutions and Regenerative Economy
The platform champions nature-based solutions and the principles of a regenerative economy, emphasizing the importance of leveraging natural processes and ecosystems to address social and environmental challenges. By promoting practices such as reforestation, sustainable agriculture, and conservation, we help social entrepreneurs develop solutions that restore and regenerate natural systems. This pillar focuses on enhancing biodiversity, mitigating climate change, and fostering a sustainable relationship between humanity and the environment. The regenerative economy aspect aims to create economic systems that renew and revitalize sources of energy and materials, encouraging a shift from extractive to restorative and circular practices.
The Team
Meet the Visionary Leaders of Social Impact Studio.ai, Driving Innovation and Global Change for a Sustainable Future
Harbrinder is a creative and visionary executive and has provided business and strategy leadership to both Silicon Valley startups and Fortune 100 companies. He is passionate about social impact, sustainability and the effects of digital transformation. Harbrinder has a proven track record in developing strategy, building teams and driving operational efficiency as well as developing a more authentic and open culture. He is a strong believer in the power of diverse perspectives and that we need to launch a generation of global problem solvers to accelerate the pace of social change.
Previously Harbrinder was responsible for delivering Cisco’s longest-running and highest impact CSR program, the Cisco Networking Academy. Under his leadership the program grew from 800K students per year to 1.9M students per year. In this role, he was responsible for the Curriculum, Delivery Platform, Product Strategy and Marketing.
In earlier roles, Harbrinder worked closely with business unit leaders to define Cisco’s security strategy, and was instrumental in acquisitions and investments in the VPN and security spaces. Before Cisco, Harbrinder was Vice President of Business Development at Bivio Networks, where he managed strategic accounts, hardware and software partnerships, and at Ubicom, a leading supplier of Internet processors and networking software. He led Ubicom’s strategy to deliver end-to-end solutions in collaboration with industry leaders and partners.
Harbrinder is married with three children. His interests include his family, Aikido, sailing, modern architecture & construction and he has been a Zen & Vipassana meditation practitioner for 29 years. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Birmingham, England.
Harbrinder Kang
Founder, CEO & Architect
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Dr. Swears has over 20 years of experience working on Department of Defense (DoD) related AI/ML/Computer-Vision projects and more recently on large-scale commercial AI/ML/Computer Vision products for Walmart stores. Dr. Swears has led and managed over 50 DoD projects, including DARPA LwLL, DARPA SAIL-ON, DARPA XAI, DARPA Blackjack, DARPA PerSEAS, DARPA VIRAT, and IARPA DIVA, along with NGA projects such as SPOTTER. These projects covered AI/ML/Computer Vision applications spanning sea, ground, air, and space using robotics, drones, aircraft, and satellites with processing on the edge. Over the course of his career, Dr. Swears has significant experience as a project lead, technical lead, AI/ML/CV developer, B&D, and proposal writer. Dr. Swears’ technical contributions followed his PhD with a focus on pattern recognition, machine learning, graphical models, scene understanding, tracking and activity recognition, anomaly detection, and multi-modal fusion. Dr. Swears also developed deep networks for object detection, scene segmentation, and anomaly detection (PerSEAS, Loft Demo), with a focus on domain adaptation (SAIL-ON), learning with few labels (LwLL), and explainability (XAI) in various applications. Dr. Swears is currently consulting for DoD contracts through Dynamo.AI LLC (dynamoaillc.com), where a relevant list of publications can be found.
Dr. Eran Swears
Founding Team and Technical Architect
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Product Manager and Platform SME – Mukund is is an Engineering and Product professional with over 18 years of experience in various domains, including Telecommunications, Networking, Cloud Engineering, and Artificial Intelligence/Computer Vision. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering (2001) with a focus on closed-loop control systems and began his career in Robotics and Hybrid Micro Circuit testing infrastructure. He completed a Master’s in Electrical Engineering from Wichita State University (2003-2005) with a specialization in Ad-hoc wireless networks. Mr. Nair’s career includes roles in Telecom and Network Engineering at Southwest Bell Corporation (SBC), AT&T, and Citigroup for five years. He then transitioned to product management and leadership roles at eBay, Cisco, Equinix, and Walmart, contributing to key product launches and mergers and acquisitions. At Equinix, he was pivotal in developing the Network Edge cloud marketplace product, which enabled virtual infrastructure over a private WAN for NFV devices and services. His efforts expanded the customer base to 100, including major companies like Cisco and Palo Alto Networks, achieving a market ARR of approximately $1M within 24 months. At Walmart, he reorganized the technology stack and established an AI/CV practice to address a $7+ billion shrink issue. His strategy and KPIs aimed to achieve a forecasted 50% reduction in shrink through improvements in sensor management, data management, reporting, BI tools, UX, and ML operations.
Mukund Nair
Founding Team and
Product SME
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Praveen comes with an MBA and over 20 years of diverse experience of managing product, program and core operations at Fortune 100 companies like Walmart, Amazon and GE. He is a goal focused professional with experience in directing cross functional, high impact initiatives, aimed at solving business use cases through a seamless blend of technology and people. His strengths are in executing overall business strategies through people and product management. He spent 11yrs with an academy organization like ‘Amazon’ where he gained a well-rounded experience in retail and supply chain, and led key business initiatives such as Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), Global Expansion, Seller experience for Amazon Retail and Amazon Advertising. More recently, last 2 years at Walmart in a CV/AI focused product; he was handpicked to lead this high revenue impacting product aimed at solving retail theft at Walmart, where he honed his product management skills and innovation mindset.
Praveen is passionate about social causes and throughout his corporate journey he actively engaged in CSR initiatives such as enabling PwD to gain mainstream employment and in climate focused initiatives.
Praveen Chhabra
Founding Team and
Business SME
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For more 35 years at Birmingham City University, Mak has provided leadership to 4 highly successful departments with annual incomes in excess of £10m. During this time Mak has combined his knowledge of electronic engineering, computer science, and business to lead the development and delivery of over £14m worth of enterprise projects, related to computer networking, IoT, data analytics, AI, logistics, niche vehicle optimisation, and the teaching and training of healthcare professionals.
In addition, Mak has an international reputation for his extensive work on the use of Vendor Resources and embedding these into various qualifications. He has worked to engage with 10 of the largest IT companies such as Cisco, Microsoft, SAS, Oracle etc… to provide a rich set of problem-based learning throughout computing, communications and engineering courses. These courses have been the basis of the collaborative work with the MoJ, industry and commerce.
This leadership in education has earned him his professorship, a range of invited roles and the Olympic torch bearer for the 2012 UK Olympics – Mak dedicates the honour of the torch to his Cisco colleagues who nominated him, and to his Cisco team at BCU.
Regarding research, Mak has co-edited a book and co-authored more than 25 publications, including book chapters on a range of topics such as computer science education, healthcare and dementia. Mak is currently involved in leading, organising and publishing in IEEE International Conferences and journals (IEEE, IGI and Springer). However, his main passion is in the use of technology-enhanced living to support those patients with mental health, dementia and generally old age.
In 2023, Mak was appointed Dean of Business Development at Global Banking School a private HE provider, which is a part of the Global Education Group (GEDU). He now spends his time supporting: programme developments, industry and education partnerships, mentoring, coaching and advising both staff and students.
Prof Mark Sharma
Advisor
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Bio coming …
Amardeep Singh
Advisor
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Bio Coming Soon….
Chad Vavra
Advisor
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Matt Hart is an innovations guy, husband, and father of two. He has
spent the last 20+ years sparking creativity in world-leading
organisations. Today, he continues to unlock business and brand
performance for clients and pay forward his experience to
nurture the global problem solvers of tomorrow.
As Founder of BIF for Enterprise, Matt leads a band of outer-minded thinkers pursuing
an empathetic approach to brand and fan innovation. The agile methods he’s developing combine the neuroscience of creativity with cutting-edge data applications to deliver new value for industry leading clients including American Idol, BBC, Cisco, Spotify, Warner Music, Unilever, and Unicef amongst many others.
In BIF for Next-Gen, Matt has founded BIFKiDS – better ideas faster by
kids – as a platform to invest in kids’ creativity:
“we’re developing kids into that which gets educated out of – their
idea superpowers, imagination, and fearless creativity – because in
a world full of robots, human creativity becomes the defining talent”
Matt is also a co-founder of the elearning platform Sideways.ai, has been
an Innovation Ambassador for Unicef UK, and is a Visiting Fellow of the
Royal Institute of Great Britain where he continues to explore the power
of creative brain science to unlock personal and professional impact.
Matt Hart
Advisor
Our Partners
A Future for Every Child
The Carbon Underground
Free Meals on Wheels