The largest-ever virtual summit for machine learning developers recently concluded after three action-packed days of tech talks, workshops, paper presentations, networking and awards. The Machine Learning Developer Summit, hosted from 11-13 February, saw more than 1,000 attendees from the data science community. The highlight of the summit was the 40 under 40 data scientists awards.
The MLDS recognised 40 young data scientists who have supported the growth of analytics in their organisation and used their deep industry experience to address most the complex challenges using analytics. The winners represented various industries including retail, insurance, e-commerce, and more. The award felicitates the real innovators and achievers of the analytics industry — the driving force behind the field’s explosive growth.
Here are the winners of 40 under 40 data scientists awards 2021.
Check out last year’s winners.
Abhishek Sanwaliya
Practice Lead – Data Science, Maersk
He currently manages AI-enabled digitisation initiatives for customer service, order handling platform and capacity planning at Maersk. Apart from managing teams across Data Sciences Research and Advanced Analytics domains, Abhishek provides thought leadership for startup accelerator ‘Oceanpro’ to help graduating startups contribute to Maersk’s digital journey. Abhishek has filed six patents, three trade secrets and has published six research papers in top peer-reviewed journals and conferences.
Aditya Agarwal
Advanced analytics Practise Lead, Abzooba
He has over 12 years of expertise in using quantitative data analysis with business understanding for enterprise decision-making. He currently leads a team of more than 50 energetic data science professionals at Abzooba while solving interesting business problems using machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing and computer vision. Aditya has built solutions such as subrogation engine, price recommendation engine, IoT sensor predictive maintenance, and many more.
Aman Garg
Head – Analytics, Vodafone Shared Services
Aman played a pivotal role in setting up and establishing Advanced Analytics centre for Vodafone in Shared Services in Pune as part of the original team. Aman works closely with the Global Head of Data & Analytics, Country Head of Business & CXO level executive in solving critical business problems. The analytics products developed by Aman and his team have delivered annual cumulative benefits of more than £20million+ in value to businesses covering Digital, CVM & Finance Analytics.
Amit Sachan
Head of Recommendations System, Reliance Jio AI Centre of Excellence
In his current role, he creates a unified recommendation engine for Jio for a variety of applications in media, retail, healthcare and news. He is currently working on interesting themes such as the role of knowledge graphs, reinforcement learning in real-life recommendation systems and integrating technologies like NLP and computer vision extensively in the context of recommendation systems.
Arul Francis
Engagement Manager, Shell
He has over 12 years of experience working in a range of organisations from start-ups to large organisations in their analytics function. At Shell, Arul has led and managed numerous engagements in data science in the Shell retail business. He has led and transformed bootstrapped startups like Ameex into a successful data science enterprise with solutions across data management, data visualisation and AI.
Ashish Kumar
Senior Director – AI Research at Reliance Jio digital services (Jio Haptik)
He builds innovative AI solutions for different Jio Haptik engagements. Ashish has strong technical leadership in conversational AI products and has contributed to many NLP initiatives. He has helped build chatbots deployed at all major banks in India and has incubated and fostered state-of-the-art technology domains from scratch in many companies. Ashish is also a published author, inventor of more than half a dozen patents in conversational AI, and has extensive know-how in conceptualising and delivering innovation while building high-performance R&D teams.
Ashish Ranjan Singh
Vice President – Customer Engineering at Innovaccer Analytics Private Limited
At Innovaccer, Ashish is leading a team of more than 100 data analysts, data engineers, and data scientists driving a transformation in healthcare. Ashish helped Innovaccer build world-class technologies, recognised internally and externally. Prior to Innovaccer, Ashish has worked at Barclays where he developed a real-time analytics engine for targeted campaigns across the globe. He was also a key player in developing the first data and analytics product for Barclays, called Smart Business portal, which is heavily used by small businesses in the UK.
Bala Gangadhar Thilak Adiboina
Senior Member – Data Science, Verizon
He has over 13 years of experience in conceptualising and implementing many innovative AI solutions in areas such as self-optimising network, dispatch analytics, 5G analytics, fraud analytics and IoT analytics. For his innovations in implemented solutions at Verizon’s Network Systems, he has filed three US patents in 2020. Bala’s Data Science journey started with his startup Favmeal in 2008, a food delivery company where he developed a solution for food delivery optimisation using Google Maps and Google Analytics.
Deepanshu Malhotra
Director, Swiggy
He has deep expertise in changing business landscape with data-driven intelligence across Banking, FMCG, and E-Commerce domains. Deepanshu leads a team of more than 40 members and is responsible for marketing, growth strategy, and financial analytics for the Food delivery business. Deepanshu is adept at applied mathematics, optimisation algorithms, supervised, unsupervised, and forecasting machine learning techniques. He was also instrumental in setting up the “COVID – Business Continuity” Team to enable sustainable growth during the pandemic.
Dipanjan Sarkar
Data Science Lead, Applied Materials
He heads the advanced analytics efforts around computer vision, natural language processing and deep learning. He primarily works on leveraging machine learning and deep learning to build large scale intelligent systems. Dipanjan is also a Google Developer Expert in Machine Learning and has advised and worked with several startups as well as Fortune 500 companies. He is also a published author and has mentored over 500 people in data science globally.
Harsha Gurulingappa
Text Analytics Lead Scientist, Merck KGaA
One of his recent accomplishments is setting up an industrialised text mining system at Merck which operates in a highly regulated GxP environment. This work has been published in two peer-reviewed journals in Q4 2020. Harsha has also helped establish an enterprise business service for text analytics from scratch at Merck. He has authored more than 27 publications and book chapters demonstrating a variety of applications of text analytics.
Hemant Palivela
Head – AI and Machine Learning, eClerx Services
He works on campaign analytics, speech processing, Natural Language Understanding/Generation and recommendation systems at the Centre of Excellence, Digital Analytics Division of eClerx. His principal areas of interest include Machine learning optimisation, linear algebra, probability theory, insurance analytics and recommendation systems.
Indrajit Mandal
Head – Data Science, Tata Consultancy Services
Throughout his career, Indrajit has worked across domains such as medical sciences, fintech industry, BPS and more. While working in the fintech industry, he had developed a data-driven AI platform for decision systems that automates business operations, bringing more scalability and improving revenue growth. While working in the IT domain, he developed cold start solutions in machine learning algorithms, of which a few are patented.
James Macwan
Manager – Analytics, JSW Steel Limited
He has over 14 years of experience in delivering large scale Data Analytics transformation programs across various industries and geographies. James has expertly led and managed the delivery of multiple data analytics and technology-agnostic business projects using agile and waterfall project delivery methodologies. In his current role, he has built a data analytics platform and big data Warehouse capabilities for real-time data analytics, ensuring an increased adoption of analytics by 45% a year.
Kamal Kumar
Head – Analytics and Data Engineering, Tata Cliq
Kamal has been responsible for setting up growth hacking, revenue and analytics teams at a couple of e-commerce firms. He started off his analytics career by establishing agile teams to deliver cutting edge analytics, data science and data engineering solutions across industry verticals spanning banking, logistics, offline retail and e-commerce. He has co-founded and led the consulting vertical of a management consulting and a product startup, providing data-driven consulting services.
Kartik Patel
Head – Insurance Analytics & Products at TransUnion CIBIL
He has over 12 years of experience in leading complex data science and actuarial science assignments for clients across the globe. Currently, he leads insurance analytics and products teams working on innovative applications of credit data of more than 400 million individuals in solving critical challenges of the Indian insurance industry. He is also associated with National Insurance Academy in training insurance professionals on insurance analytics and has cleared nine actuarial science papers from Society of Actuaries and Casualty Actuarial Society.
Kiran Rokkam
Data Science, Tiger Analytics
Kiran heads the innovation lab at Tiger Analytics. He has been responsible for bringing several cutting edge innovations in data science automation, which are helping drive the next phase of growth for the company. Kiran has developed solutions in customer analytics, marketing analytics, operations planning, pricing, risk, etc. He has worked with a broad spectrum of data science techniques ranging from classic econometric modelling to the latest in deep learning and NLP.
Lavi Nigam
Data Scientist, Gartner
At Gartner, he is developing MLOps practices to produce auto-deployable models to streamline and improve data quality. In his previous jobs, he has developed NLP models to work across multiple locations and worked with deep learning algorithms and operationalising autoDL production systems. He has also worked with IITs and NITs as subject matter expert to design industry-relevant courses for AI.
Manikandan Jeeva
Asst. Vice President, Genpact
He has over 15 years of experience in pharmaceutical and healthcare analytical and consulting across functional areas such as commercial analytics, clinical trial analytics and supply chain analytics. Manikandan is an experienced project manager in handling substantial business intelligence and analytics projects in cloud transition, marketing mix model, neural network implementation for data quality system, public data mining and integration for brand insights, among others.
Mihir Punjabi
Solutions Director Architect – Edge Intelligence, Capgemini
Mihir is an Edge Intelligence and AI evangelist, currently responsible for crafting AI solutions across Digital Engineering and Manufacturing Services along with supporting AI solutions across Capgemini. With over 17 years of experience in product development and business development across Storage, Building Automation and Embedded domains, Mihir has led several projects across domains. He is a thought leader and has presented papers at various industry forums and events.
Muthumari S
Associate Director, Analytics, Brillio Technologies
She heads the Data Science CoE and specialises in delivering AI/ML use-cases at scale across customer/product/marketing analytics, NLP and vision analytics. In her current role, she works with CXOs to help them make accurate data-driven decisions as well as solve ambiguous problems involving unstructured text/image and machine-generated data with tangible business impact. She works as a thought leader and people leader, helping build data science talent and capabilities within Brillio.
Mythili Krishnan
Vice President – Analytics advisory senior manager, Accenture
She has more than 14 years of experience in various areas of analytics, data science and AI including credit risk management, marketing analytics, Infrastructure services and retail analytics. Mythili has built teams and analytical practices from bottoms up and has contributed to the strategic vision of the organisation with speed and agility. She has in-depth knowledge of statistical modelling and econometrics.
Nitin Aggarwal
Technical PM, Cloud AI, Google
Nitin is responsible for designing AI solutions and products for Google’s strategic enterprise customers. Nitin has donned many hats during his professional career such as consultant, product manager, team lead, analyst, innovation expert, software engineer and technical document writer. He loves automating things using AI/ML and finds Mathematics and Data Analytics fun to work with.
Nitish Palaparti
Business Analytics Specialist, Microsoft
He has over ten years of experience across multiple divergent domains like FMCG, pharmaceuticals, banking and e-commerce. Nitish has worked on NLP, multi-class models, label classification and regression cases. He has built and deployed predictive, market mix and forecasting models and conducted enormous research by comparing on-Prem, cloud and auto ML models. Currently, he is building a Recommender System for Microsoft cloud.
Parikshit Nag
Country Manager, Data Science, Hindustan Unilever Ltd.
He spearheads the data science initiatives at Hindustan Unilever. He has been responsible for developing key data science products which help augment human intelligence with AI & ML. He has also developed a multi-horizon automated forecasting engine used across various business functions. He has a patent pending for this product.
Piyush Gupta
Head of Intelligence, PayU Finance India Pvt Ltd.
Piyush has developed a next-generation data analytics platform at PayU Finance to serve the needs of the business for quick experimentation, real-time location-based marketing, and sales. Under his guidance, the data science team has developed NLP chatbots and in-house solutions for the identification of first-party fraud in Citi. His interest lies in solving complex problems using mathematics, statistics, and large-scale computing.
Pooja Aggarwal
Advisory Research Scientist at IBM Research India
Her current research focuses on infusing artificial intelligence into IT technical service processes. She has led the design and implementation of advanced prototypes as well as production-ready features such as action recommendation, event grouping and fault localisation. Pooja has designed and developed the cognitive question-quality-improvement system, a platform for automating enterprise after-sales support systems. She has published 16 papers in prestigious conferences and journals in the area of text analytics, parallel computing, conversation systems, software engineering etc.
Sandeep Earayil
Head – Machine Learning and Quantitative Analytics, Credit Suisse
He has over ten years of experience building Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning solutions in the financial sector. Sandeep is also one of the pioneers of using AI/ML in the field of alternative data at the esteemed UBS evidence lab and now at Credit Suisse. He leads a team of ML researchers who works in areas like Geospatial analytics, Natural Language Processing, Graph Analytics and Pattern mining.
Sanjay Shukla
Director – Data Science, Media and Customer Engagement, Dunnhumby
He is passionate about building innovative AI and machine learning solutions to provide actionable insights, highly-relevant product recommendations and media measurement resulting in improved customer experiences in retail. Sanjay has led the development and deployment of multiple advanced and scalable ML-based solutions. He has published multiple research papers on optimisation and machine learning approaches in peer-reviewed Journals.
Satyen Abrol
Principal Research Scientist, Rakuten India
He has over 12 years of experience in user personalisation, location mining and online social networks. At Rakuten, he leads two teams across two departments — Research and Applied Data Science. The research team is building a Customer Social Graph to understand the relationship between Rakuten users, products and businesses. Whereas, the applied sciences team is building a framework to help marketers achieve business objectives by recommending right users, right channel, right time and the right incentive for targeting.
Sayanti Bhattacharya
Senior Manager, Ugam, a Merkle company
Sayanti currently leads Analytics for Fortune 500 companies, across industries such as Retail & Consumer Brands and eCommerce, helping various business functions drive impact and ROI, and institutionalise analytics practices at scale. At Ugam, Sayanti has designed and set-up the framework for scaled deliveries on analytics services and solutions. Her Consumer Sentiment Analysis solution is used by Product Engineering, Quality and Brand teams for addressing product development, innovation and product improvements in various categories.
Sharmistha Chatterjee
Senior Manager, Data Sciences at Publicis Sapient
She currently leads the digital transformation of clients across industry verticals ranging from Media, Travel and Hospitality, Advertising, IoT, and Telecom. Sharmistha is an active blogger and an international speaker at various tech conferences. She has filed five US patents and published in international conferences and journals. She is also a Google Developer Expert and enjoys mentoring.
Shrutendra Harsola
Sr Machine Learning Scientist, Intuit India
He has a strong background in statistics, machine learning, natural language processing. In his current role, he leads the AI track in the area of Growth and Retention for QBO-Advanced, a cloud-based accounting solution for growing small to mid-sized businesses. Shrutendra is responsible for taking AI ideas from conceptualisation to production driving significant customer benefit in collaboration with multiple stakeholders. He has been a part of Microsoft Bing Ads team in the past.
Suguna Jayaraj
Senior Manager- Predictive Modelling, AIG Analytics & Services Private Limited.
She leads the predictive modelling capability for the general insurance products at AIG and has deep expertise in pricing/rating for the P&C insurance as well as in credit risk rating for banking products for cards. Suguna has built the team to support the actuarial pricing and portfolio management. Most of her work revolves around improving the performance of the actuarial unit by adding granularity of the pricing framework, increasing the underwriting process efficiency and building competitive strategies.
Sumit Bhatia
Senior Research Scientist, IBM Research India.
He is the co-architect of IBM Expressive Reasoning Graph Store, a first of its kind graph-based reasoning platform that supports both Property Graphs and RDF graphs. Sumit has developed novel algorithms for entity-oriented search and exploration on knowledge graphs deployed by multiple enterprise clients and government security agencies. Sumit has over 50 publications in top-tier venues, 14 US patents, and more than 1,200 citations to his research.
Swapnil Srivastava
Vice President & Global Head of Analytics, Evalueserve
Swapnil heads the Analytics Practice for Evalueserve where he works with clients to help them build analytics capabilities that enable successful business outcomes. He has built a multi-disciplinary team of domain SMEs, data architects, data engineers, data scientists and technology experts, making Evalueserve an end-to-end analytics partner for its clients. He has developed several Analytics Frameworks for Evalueserve and its F500 clients.
Swapnil Tambi
Director AI & ML, BNY Mellon
He has extensive experience in modelling and analytics. A strong problem solver and team leader, he is known for bringing strategic thinking into business problems. His key areas of expertise include hypothesis generation, data wrangling, feature engineering, classification model building, model validation and more.
Vartul Mittal
Technology & Innovation Specialist, Formerly IBM
Vartul is a leading technology & Innovation Specialist and a distinguished digital transformation Leader who has driven many interesting developments in the space of advanced analytics, intelligent automation and multi-cloud adoption. He has 14+ years of strong global business transformation experience in management consulting with a key focus on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Engineering across various sectors.
Vibhu Srivastava
Assistant Vice President, AI Works, Max Life Insurance
Vibhu has been instrumental in carving the AI works team along with building a brand for Max Life across external forums. With his strong focus on ‘business first’ AI solutions, he has driven measurable, direct and unprecedented business impact. He has a strong hands-on technical expertise in areas such as machine learning, deep learning, NLP.
Vikram Khurana
Head of Data, Times Internet Gaana
He is the head of data at the largest music streaming company in India and has been responsible for setting up data teams in previous organisations. Vikram has helped many organisations in India and outside in realising multifold gains from data. He has rich experience in B2B, B2C, consulting and start-up space.
