Guest Talk Organized By Department Of Data Science, CHRIST, Lavasa

A guest talk aptly entitled `Let's Huddle on Data’ was organized by Department of Data Science, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Lavasa, Pune on 19th September 2019 in the Smart Room from 12:30 PM to 2:30 PM. It was efficiently facilitated by Mr. K Sridharan (CEO - CleverInsight) and Mr. Robin (CTO - CleverInsight). The talk was addressed to I-Sem, B Sc (DS), M Sc (DS) and MA (Economics) students.

 

Mr Kothandaraman Sridharan is an IT veteran and has co-founded BFL Software - Mphasis, which is currently owned by HP. He is currently working as CEO of CleverInsight, a premium analytics company, Mindshare Learning Centre Inc Cupertino, California. He did BE in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from India and Masters in Business Management from Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

 

He began his career in Wipro and headed its Customer Support organization. Mr Sridharan has also written an operating system and compiled application packages such as production planning and control. He has rich experience in sales and support. He is a member of the advisory board - University of Memphis (MIS) - FedEx Institute of Technology. Mr Sridharan specializes in outsourcing, energy and environment, supply chain and education.

 

 Mr. Bastin Robin is currently working as a Chief Data Scientist at CleverInsight for past two years and nine months. He is also Adjunct Professor and an author. He hails from Bengaluru and strongly believes in simplicity. Mr Bastin did BE from Adithya Institute of Technology, Computer Science and Engineering from Suguna Polytechnic College and has done Diploma in Computer Engineering.

 

He is responsible for development of their data platform called NeuronAi. He takes care of the open source data preprocessing engine called Sparx. Apart from this Mr Bastin is adept in researching on handling unstructured data for industries such as FMCG and Manufacturing. Mr Bastin works on areas such as recommendation systems, spam filtering, user modeling, fraud detection, social graph mining, emotional modeling, sentimental analysis, graph search and churn prediction. He has an important role to lead the research and development of Hash Research Lab and is responsible for developing and leading the engineering team.

 

The talk gave an introduction to CleverInsight Open AI Foundation (Data Science Community). The discussion was on problem statements and teams were invited to be a part of the discussion. The salient feature of the talk was motivating students how to get involved as a volunteer and be an integral part of the Data Science community.

Upon being interviewed Mr. Kothandaraman Sridharan said that data science is in demand at the moment. He spoke about a perceptible change in the system and attitude of people when he was in college and what is there at present. He felt elated to speak about the most significant change that he brought to an organization. Mr Sridhar articulated that India is heading towards digitilization and is hopeful of a promising career for data scientists in near future. He rightly pointed out that artificial intelligence is the need of the hour and India will soon adapt to it with the advent of new tools and languages, which work in tandem with the current technology. Mr Sridharan ended his conversation with some personal anecdotes.

 In another interview Mr. Robin gave inputs about key skills and software knowledge a data scientist should possess. He stressed upon the need for the importance of a data scientist to a company. He gave valuable feedback about the area in which a data scientist should be strong. Mr Robin informed the criteria for selection of a data scientist by a company. He clarified the basic difference between a data analyst and a data scientist and clearly expressed his opinion on data science being machine learning or data mining. He also spoke about the advanced tools used by companies in data science process and the challenges being faced during the process. He concluded his interview with some insightful information about what can a student expect when he enters the field of data science.