The CEO of an Indian AI startup, Suchana Seth, has been arrested on suspicion of murdering her 4-year-old son, whose remains were reportedly discovered inside her luggage. Authorities apprehended Seth in the southern Karnataka state after contacting a taxi driver transporting her and instructing him to take her to the nearest police station, as reported by Reuters, citing Goa police official Paresh Naik.
According to Naik, Seth had checked into a hotel in Goa on Saturday, and upon her departure on Monday night, the child was missing. Hotel cleaning staff subsequently found blood stains in Seth’s room and promptly alerted the police, as revealed by Naik to the news agency.
North Goa Superintendent of Police Nidhin Valsa stated, “When her luggage was opened, the child’s dead body was found,” as reported by Reuters.
The details surrounding the purported murder remain unclear, but according to the Indian news website The Week, Seth informed the police that she and her husband are estranged, and divorce proceedings are currently underway.
Following her arrest, Seth has been transported back to the Goa state for reported interrogations. Simultaneously, her husband, who was in Indonesia when the incident occurred, has been requested to return to India, as reported by Reuters. CEO of an Indian
The 39-year-old CEO’s company, headquartered in Bangalore, states on its website, “We are a team with deep expertise in AI ethics and hands-on prototyping, deployment, and scaling of machine learning systems. We comprehend the data science project life cycle from end to end and acknowledge the challenges associated with deploying AI systems in the real world. Our philosophy emphasizes the value of human-in-the-loop AI systems, empowering humans to construct ethical AI.”
Seth’s LinkedIn profile describes her as an “AI ethics expert and data scientist with over 12 years of experience in mentoring data science teams and scaling machine learning solutions at startups and industry research labs.” It also notes that she served as a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University.
According to Harvard’s website, during her time at Berkman, Suchana was focused on studying methods to operationalize ethical machine learning and AI in the industry. Her areas of interest included auditing algorithms for fairness, accountability, and transparency in machine learning, ethical monetization of AI, security vulnerabilities specific to machine learning and AI systems, and the regulatory landscape for predictive algorithms.