TINKERTECH LABORATORIES - Key Persons
Dr. Kyle Keane is a lecturer at MIT where he teaches Principles and Practices of Assistive Technology - a senior capstone engineering course that pairs small teams of students with community members with disabilities to collaboratively co-design and prototype technology to help them accomplish an activity more independently. He is also an AI Research Scientist at MIT's Quest for Intelligence. Dr. Keane is one of the founders of the Humanistic Co-design Initiative - an organization dedicated to helping establish local communities of practice that co-design assistive technologies that are suitable for the local economic, social, and cultural context. Dr. Keane has extensive expertise in digital and physical accessibility, and has been involved in disability advocacy his entire life after being born with the degenerative eye condition Retinitis Pigmentosa.
Madhav Lavakare is a young entrepreneur from New Delhi, India. He has had a passion for tinkering, creating, and innovating from a very young age, and has a keen eye for solving problems. With TranscribeGlass™, he aims to solve the biggest problem he's tackled yet: bridging the communication gap between the D/deaf and Hard of Hearing community and mainstream society. Madhav has been awarded the Prime Minister's National Child Award and a Presidential Gold Medal, the highest Indian civilian honor for a student. He is also a Ashoka Youth Venturer. TranscribeGlass has won the Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam IGNITE award organized by the National Innovation Foundation of India.
Job Titles:
- Project Manager
- Trustee of Stagetext
Matthew has spent his career in the technology industry in various roles. He is currently at ThoughtWorks, building teams and products for their clients. As a disability champion, he sees inclusive technology as essential to help create a socially and economically just world.
Matthew is a trustee of Stagetext, a UK charity that provides captioning and live subtitling services to cultural events and venues. He is also a trustee of Scope, the disability equality charity in the UK helping them to collaborate with tech companies to make the digital world more inclusive. He's on Scope's Big Hack Advisory Board to encourage and embrace inclusive design as a culture and practice.
Matthew was born deaf.
P. V. Madhusudhan Rao is a chair professor in the department of mechanical engineering and head of the Design Department at IIT Delhi. He is a co-founder of the AssisTech lab which works towards development of assistive technologies for empowerment of the differently-abled.
Suman Saraf, CTO of BlueStacks, is passionate about bringing cutting-edge technologies to market, based on in-depth insight and extensive hands-on experience that he has gained building large-scale production systems.
Job Titles:
- Founder of Sanket Foundation
Tina Saighal is the founder of Sanket Foundation, a non-profit for Deaf and Hard of Hearing People in India and is hard of hearing. She has professional experience of over 15 years as an architect in India and then as a venture development consultant at a private equity firm in London. She has served on the board of trustees of the Royal Association for the Deaf People (RAD), in London for over 5 years.
Tom is a recent Stanford graduate with a degree in biomedical informatics. Due to a bilateral hearing loss, he's particularly interested in hearing research, with the hope of one day achieving communication parity for the Deaf/HOH. He believes that TranscribeGlass' innovative wearable display brings such a future well within our grasp. He has tackled Deaf/HOH challenges from multiple angles, including conducting academic research in hearing regeneration, founding Stanford's first club for the Deaf/HOH, and performing volunteer/advocacy work for hearing loss. At TranscribeGlass, Tom is responsible for user trials, fundraising, sales, and marketing. ​