Suchana Seth, co-founder of Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence start-up Mindful AI Lab, is in police custody for killing her four-year-old son in a resort-apartment in North Goa's Candolim.
While reports say Suchana murdered her son to stop her estranged husband from meeting him, police are yet to ascertain the motive of the crime
Suchana Seth, co-founder of Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence start-up Mindful AI Lab, is in police custody for killing her four-year-old son in a resort-apartment in North Goa's Candolim.
Suchana Seth was caught in Karnataka's Chitradurga district when she was travelling in a taxi, carrying her son's body in a bag. While reports said Suchana murdered her son to stop her estranged husband from meeting him, police said the motive behind the murder would be established only after her interrogation.
Suchana Seth gave a Bengaluru address while checking into room 404 at Candolim’s Hotel Sol Banyan Grande on Saturday, a TOI report quoted inspector Paresh Naik of Calangute police as saying.
The crime was uncovered after a member of the housekeeping staff found a bloodstain while cleaning the apartment after Suchana Seth checked out on Monday morning.
The website of Suchana Seth's start-up Mindful AI Lab 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 start-ups and industry research labs."
Suchana Seth, who hails from West Bengal, also featured on the '100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics' List for 2021.
Suchana Seth has been a Mozilla Fellow at Data & Society, a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Centre at Harvard University, and a research fellow at the Raman Research Institute, the website reads.
"She also holds patents in natural language processing," her bio says.
"Suchana has advised research on IoT ethics, mentored data-for-good projects with DataKind, and led data science workshops with organizations like Women Who Code," the info on Mindful AI Lab website reads.
It adds that as a physicist, Suchana "brings a complex systems perspective to auditing and designing AI for inclusion, robustness, fairness, interpretability, transparency, and accountability."
"Suchana loves to spark conversations about AI ethics through her talks and writings. She writes speculative fiction and poetry, and loves to dream up storytelling machines," it says.
According to details in an indiatoday.in report, Suchana Seth and her husband had filed for divorce, proceedings for which were nearly finalised. The report, quoting sources, said Suchana was unhappy with a court order that allowed her estranged husband to meet their son every Sunday.
Consequently, she planned to end her son's life before her husband's scheduled visit, the report said.
Police said that the husband was in Indonesia's Jakarta when the crime was committed.
"Prima facie, during our initial inquiry, the lady mentioned that she had a troubled relationship with her husband and their divorce process was nearly finalised. There was also a court order causing distress to her. Interrogation is ongoing, and we are required to present her before the court. The motive is yet to be confirmed; this is what she conveyed to our investigators. We need to review the court order before making further statements," the indiatoday.in report quoted Nidhin Valson, North Goa's Superintendent of Police, as saying.
Later, a news agency PTI report also quoted a police officer as saying that Suchana Seth has confirmed that she and her husband were separated and are undergoing divorce proceedings.