Who are the Top 10 Data Scientists In India? The data science community is rapidly expanding, and data science units are increasingly becoming critical components of organizations across sectors. Data scientists are responsible for making data-driven organizational choices, from understanding big data sets to using them in business decisions. Analytics India Magazine publishes a list of top data scientists each year to recognize data science experts who have shown an extraordinary journey in the discipline.
This is the sixth year of the industry-acclaimed list, in which we have recognized the top ten data scientists from various backgrounds who have made major contributions, brought about new inventions, and shown unprecedented successes in their data science journey.
We included data scientists who operate with organizations or individuals, regardless of size or kind of work, for the list. Also, we do not duplicate names from past years, so please review previous years’ inclusions.
Top 10 Data Scientists In India:
Abhishek Thakur
Analytics and Data Science Journey: During his master’s degree, he became interested in machine learning and data science, and he has since managed data science teams at numerous organizations. It was also at this time that he began working with Kaggle. He started in the industry, earned his Ph.D., quit after a year, and has since worked as a data scientist for several companies.
Current Role and Responsibilities: He works as a data scientist in Norway, focusing on applied machine learning and Natural Language Processing.
Significant Achievements: Abhishek Thakur became the world’s first quadruple grandmaster on Kaggle in 2020. In his spare time, he enjoys creating YouTube videos. He has also just written a book on applied machine learning titled “Approaching (Almost) Any Machine Learning Problem.” While working for the industry, he also published articles at an ICML workshop and co-authored two patents.
Education: He received his Bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering from NIT Surat before enrolling in the MSc in Computer Science program at the University of Bonn in Germany.
Aditya Agarwal
Analytics & Data Science Journey: He has led data science practices in numerous organizations with over 12 years of expertise in utilizing quantitative data analysis with business insight for corporate decision-making. He began his analytics career with ICICI Prudential, providing data-driven value to business areas such as client acquisition, retention, actuary, underwriting, fraud, and claim management.
As the Advanced Analytics Practice Lead at Abzooba, Aditya manages a team of 50+ enthusiastic data science specialists who solve challenging business issues using machine learning, deep learning, Natural Language Processing, and computer vision. He helps companies convert their business goals into analytical issues and data-driven solutions by providing thought leadership in AI.
Significant Achievements: Many organizations have automated mundane processes, decreased operational costs, increased team productivity, and enhanced top-line and bottom-line revenues under his direction. He has created solutions such as a subrogation engine, a pricing suggestion engine, and predictive maintenance for IoT sensors.
Aditya graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi with a Bachelor of Technology in Textile Technology and a Minor in Business Management.
Anubhav Shrivastava
Anubhav started his foray into forecast-led decisioning as an investment analyst appraising corporations. Since then, he has been enabling in addressing enterprise-level quantitative business challenges throughout Europe, the Americas, and Asia over the past decade and a half. Anubhav is a full-stack data scientist who has led various offline-to-online data interventions and groundbreaking machine-learning solutions in the healthcare, manufacturing, finance, and media sectors.
Anubhav’s current function and duties are as follows: Anubhav oversees everything data science within Viacom18’s Digital Ventures business. According to his admission, he enjoys the excitement of working in the B2C technology arena, where the options are endless, and there is much potential to define not just the future of efficient business models but also user behavior at scale.
Anubhav has been credited for institutionalizing data science as a function across many organizations. His endeavors include developing useable products such as recommender systems, knowledge graphs, and deep spatial systems since he believes in a simple design. Anubhav has also played a key role in pragmatically developing data privacy and digital protection policies.
He graduated with honors from IIT Kanpur and a bachelor’s degree in engineering.
Bishwarup Bhattacharjee
Bishwarup’s Analytics and Data Science Journey: Despite having a solid statistical background, Bishwarup’s aptitude for coding aided him in transitioning to data science. Bishwarup has formerly worked with Here Technology, Aditya Birla, and VMware. Bishwarup enjoys taking on new challenges and learning new things. In his leisure time, he enjoys participating in online hackathons.
Current Role and Responsibilities: Bishwarup is now a Senior Manager at EagleView, an industry leader in aerial imaging. He oversees the whole ML effort and development for one of their great products. His responsibilities include scoping, data collection and extraction, image processing, machine learning model building, validation, and deployment.
Significant Achievements: A Kaggle grandmaster, Biswarup ranked ninth in the world among more than 100K active data science participants in 2017. Biswarup has mostly worked in the Computer Vision arena, developing scalable and sustainable systems. He feels that there is too much to learn in machine learning for one lifetime and that aspiring to be excellent at everything is unrealistic.
Bishwarup earned a bachelor’s degree in statistics from the University of Calcutta in 2008.
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Dipanjan Sarkar
Dipanjan’s analytics and data science journey includes working with organizations like Intel and Red Hat (now a part of IBM) to build large-scale intelligent systems in infrastructure, supply chain, software products, security, and semiconductors. Dipanjan also often conducts (pro gratis) consultancy sessions with various start-ups in the Indian start-up ecosystem on best practices for exploiting AI and ML.
Dipanjan presently works as a Data Science Lead at Applied Materials India, where he focuses on addressing difficult challenges utilizing machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, and natural language processing (NLP).
Significant Achievements: Throughout his professional career, Dipanjan has won various distinctions for demonstrating excellent devotion and generating commercial value, including designation by Google as a Google Developer Expert in Machine Learning. At prior employers, he was engaged in forming data science teams from the ground up and establishing an analytics center of excellence. He has written seven books on machine learning, deep learning, transfer learning, natural language processing (NLP), and several papers and articles. He has open-sourced most of his studies and is among GitHub’s top 1.1K persons.
Dipanjan has a Master of Technology degree from IIIT Bangalore, specializing in software engineering and data science. Aside from that, he has various executive education credentials, most recently in AI Strategy from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He is also taking a Post Graduate Diploma in ML & AI from Columbia University to keep up with the ever-changing world of new-age technology.
Ratnakar Pandey
Journey in Analytics and Data Science: Ratnakar Pandey (RP) has over 18 years of AI and Data Science expertise. He has been an early adopter of new ideas and developments in the data science sector, exemplifying the ethos of lifelong learning. He has held top leadership roles in organizations, including Kabbage, Citigroup, Target, and Texas Instruments, where he was key in implementing multi-million dollar ML programs.
Current Role and Responsibilities: He is currently leading ML and Analytics for Customer Service at Amazon, where his focus areas include Natural Language Processing and Understanding (NLP/NLU), Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Bots Optimisation, and Vernacular Product Development using unstructured data from India and other geographies.
Significant Achievements: He has received various honors for his outstanding contributions in the sector, including Analytics100, Leader in Action, Outstanding Revenue Impact, and Project Excellence Award. RP is also an Analytics Evangelist, writing articles for well-known magazines in his spare time. He has also given papers worldwide and spends time with students in the classroom and online to discover and foster the potential for the profession.
He has an MBA from ISB Hyderabad, a Master’s degree from the University of Arkansas, and a BTech from HBTI Kanpur.
Sheela Siddappa
Sheela’s love for data science began during her engineering days when she saw the applications and the value they could contribute to the domain. She has over 14 years of industry experience and is a passionate and devoted data science student. Sheela has worked as a Senior Research Scientist and a Scientist at Infosys and General Motors Research Centers, respectively.
Dr. Sheela is the Chief Advisor for the Data Science Program at Bosch, where she helps the unit with technological solutions, business trends, counseling, recruiting, and so on. Her practical, rigorous data science solutions have been a success for many Bosch clients, tackling business difficulties in industries such as Industry 4.0, healthcare, energy, manufacturing, smart cities, and so on.
She is the Associate Editor for Inderscience – International Journal of Big Data Management. Aside from that, she serves on the advisory boards of many universities, including RVCE in Bangalore, PSG Institute of Technology in Coimbatore, SSN Institute in Chennai, and Jain University in Bengaluru. She has three patents and over 25 international journal and conference papers. She is a member of many organizations, including CII, NASSCOM, and others, and has been asked to lecture at several conferences.
Sheela has a Ph.D. (2006) in Industrial Engineering with a major in Machine Learning and Optimisation from the University of Texas at Arlington in the United States and an MS (2002) from the same institution. She graduated with honors from RVCE in Bengaluru in 2000.
Sonny Laskar
Journey in Analytics and Data Science: With over a decade of expertise in data and analytics, his current emphasis is on AIOps for developing next-generation IT infrastructure. He says a smart data scientist can “think like a scientist, code like a developer, and sell like a salesperson.” He was a member of the TCS data science team that constructed India’s biggest Banking Data Warehouse for SBI, which processes over 50TB of data daily.
Sonny is the Director – Principal Data Scientist at Microland and is in charge of the engineering of Microland’s AIOps platform. A typical day for him begins with a Sudoku puzzle, followed by reading the newest tweets on AI and Data Science, and then a series of engineering talks about new approaches to address prior issues and a series of “parallel POCs.” Apart from building up Kubernetes Clusters, running federated Xgboost, and undertaking feature engineering at scale, one of his key duties is to create an “AI Platform at Scale.”
Significant Achievements: Sonny is one of the few data scientists in India who serves in leadership positions while still participating in hackathons. He has won over 20 hackathons, including those hosted by Kaggle, Techgig, and others. He is an AWS Architect with experience designing and implementing solutions to Hybrid Data Center challenges such as cost optimization, anomaly detection, and recommendation engines.
Sonny has an MBA from IIM Indore and an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology in Shibpur (formerly Bengal Engineering & Science University, Shibpur).
Suvadip Chakraborty
Suvadip’s Analytics and Data Science Journey: Suvadip has over 12 years of expertise in delivering unique data-driven solutions for business issues. He has extensive expertise in the banking and financial services industries, having worked in various areas such as leadership, project management, and business consulting across all regions.
Suvadip’s current role and responsibilities include directing the analytics team for HSBC Commercial Banking’s growth and innovation efforts and building end-to-end strategies to acquire new business and improve customer experience. He is responsible for building solutions using algorithms, using new-age technologies and platforms, and allowing large-scale implementation.
Suvadip has created and managed a strong team of data scientists, developing innovative analytical solutions for the bank’s growth ambitions and driving the unit’s innovation agenda. His work has emphasized commercialization and the creation of new assets via applied research, fostering cooperation across engineering and MLOps to produce end-to-end data products and solutions.
He has a Master’s in economics from the Delhi School of Economics and is a Certified SAFe Agilist and Chartered Data Scientist (CDS).
Usha Rengaraju
Usha’s Analytics and Data Science Journey: Usha is a polymath with deep domain expertise in areas such as quantitative finance, marketing, and genomics, to mention a few. She specializes in probabilistic graphical models and has created algorithmic trading systems based on Bayesian networks. She has worked on fascinating machine learning use cases across various sectors, including telecommunications, semiconductors, manufacturing, and cybersecurity.
She currently leads eight communities in two cities — Bangalore and Mysuru — including the TensorFlow User Group (TFUG Mysore), Google Developer Group (GDG Mysore), Women TechMakers Ambassador for Mysuru, Women in Data Science Ambassador (Mysuru), Women in Machine Learning and Data Science (WiMLDS – Bangalore and Mysuru), and others. She is a member of the editorial boards of many international publications devoted to advanced study and research. She also serves on the boards of many businesses and research laboratories in educational institutions (CAIRE – Centre for AI Research and Education).
Usha is India’s first female Kaggle Grandmaster, and she organized NeuroAI, India’s first-ever academic conference on the intersection of neuroscience and data science. She has written the curriculum for BITS Pilani’s online master’s degree in data science (20,000+ students) and Upgrades PGP program in data science (10,000+ students). She is an invited speaker at several conferences, presenting various business workshops and Faculty development programs for prominent colleges in India.
She has a master’s degree in Financial Engineering and Risk Management from Columbia University, a micro master’s degree in Marketing Analytics from UC Berkeley, and an executive specialty in Life Sciences from Harvard University.
