Kanna Rajan

Kanna Rajan is a Fellow at SIFT, LLC a small think tank working on AI related projects for the US Department of Defense. He is also a Visiting Professor, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto. He was the Principal Researcher in Autonomy at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. He spent 10 years at NASA as a Senior Research Scientist and his software flew on 2 deep space missions, including on the surface of Mars. He is also the Co-Founder of a Cybersecurity startup in California’s Silicon Valley. Kanna’s focus is on the use of decision-theoretic AI techniques to enable maritime robots sample the oceans intelligently. This is to ensure that robotic vehicles, with no human control, can make the ‘right measurements at the right places at the right time’ in the upper water-column. He will be a Fulbright Scholar in Spring 2022 in Portugal.