With our annual ranking on analytics courses offered in India, we aim to provide a roadmap to analytics professionals in excelling their skills. It remains one of the most asked questions by analytics professionals on which are the best courses offered in the industry. With this ranking, we try to clear the existing confusion in prospective students mind. According to research, there are more than 200 analytics courses in India, and picking the one that suits a student’s requirement can be challenging.

While we have been doing a combined ranking of full time and executive courses till now, this year we have brought a separate ranking for both, keeping in mind the target audience. On one hand, where full time courses may suit those willing to give more time in completing these courses, executive courses work the best for working professionals. Keeping in line with their busy schedules, these courses are designed in a way that lets them make the most of it—weekend scheduled, online classes, case based studies, being a few.

For this year’s study we received 15+ nominations and these institutes have been ranked on six parameters i.e. course content, pedagogy, external collaborations, faculty, brand value and other attributes like placement assistance, LMS, events, virtual labs and others. These have been rated on a scale of 1-5 (where 1 is for Worst and 5 is for Best) for all 6 parameters individually to arrive at an overall ranking. Apart from these parameters, the study also considered students as well as expert feedback before arriving at Top 10 Executive Analytics Courses in India – Ranking 2017.

1. PGP in Business Analytics and Business Intelligence – Great Lakes Institute of Management

• Headquarter: Gurgaon
• Cities of Operation: Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Pune
• Mode of Delivery: Both classroom sessions and online learning.
• Duration of Program: 1 year
• No. of hours: 340 hours (240 classroom hours + 100 hours of online/ classroom learning)
• Cost of the Program: INR 3.95 Lakhs + Taxes

PGP-BABI continues to be our top ranked course for 3rd year. Delivered by Great Learning, which is an online and hybrid learning company that offers high-quality, impactful, and industry-relevant learning programs to working professionals.

Course Content (Rating 4.9): The course curriculum is divided into three stages—business foundation that covers basis of management along with statistical method, analytical techniques that covers in-depth study of analytical tools and techniques such as R, Tableau, SAS, and finally the application & industry exposure which includes industry led modules in various domains of analytics including retail marketing, financial and risk analytics etc.

Pedagogy (Rating 4.8): PGP-BABI uses a combination of learning methods that include classroom teaching, self-learning through videos and reading materials, team-based problem solving, and sessions with industry experts. Some of the distinguishing features are blended learning module, corporate collaboration, and capstone project that allows you to apply your learning to real industry projects and add it to your portfolio.

Faculty (Rating 4.8): The faculty to student ratio is 1:6 with 18 faculties holding PhD and 62 with industry experience. Two of their faculty members, Dr. PK Viswanathan and Dr. Bappaditya have been featured in the top ten academicians of the country, while Dr. RL Shankar has been featured as “The Professional Simplifier”.

External Collaboration (Rating 4.7): They have collaborated with over 100+ industry experts who design, deliver, and endorse their program. They are instrumental in mentoring their candidates through the capstone project, resume workshops, and career enhancement sessions. Their alumni earn dual certification from Great Lakes Institute of Management and Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago.

Brand Value (Rating 4.7): Great Lakes, within a short span has emerged to be one of the top ranked business schools in India. With a lot of accreditations to its name, it has become the youngest B-School in India to have received accreditation by Association of MBAs (AMBA, UK) for its PGPM and PGXPM programs. Its PGP-BABI program has been the leading executive courses in analytics.

Other Attributes (Rating 4.8): They have a dedicated team for customer success to engage and aid alumni for career success. The Great Lakes Job Board can be accessed by all participants even after they have graduated from the program. They conduct resume workshops and industry sessions. They conduct virtual lab events and have a LMS, Olympus that is scalable and comprehensive technology platform that encapsulates all aspects of blended and mentored learning.

The overall rating for Great Lakes Institute of Management is 4.78

2. PGPDM in Data Science and Machine Learning- University of Chicago

• Headquarter: Bengaluru
• Cities of Operation: Bengaluru, Gurgaon
• Duration of Program: 10 months with 1-year access to Jigsaw LMS
• No. of hours: 450+ hours (96 hours of in-person training + 40 hours of live online + 200+ hours of recorded videos +100+ hours on capstone project)
• Mode of Delivery: Both/Blended
• Cost of the Program: INR 3.35 Lakhs + Taxes

Though a recent entrant in the space, this program wins due to 3 reasons – exceptional brand value associated with University of Chicago, extensive industry collaboration and course content that encompasses all aspects of data science.

Course Content (Rating 4.9): This is the most comprehensive data science program, with a curriculum spanning analytics, machine learning, deep learning and AI. University of Chicago Graham School & IBM tied up to provide a detailed and cutting edge analytics and machine learning course.

Pedagogy (Rating 4.5): The PGPDM is application-oriented in nature, integrating business strategy, project-based learning, simulations, case studies, and specific electives addressing the needs of the industry. It is delivered in three ways—In-person classes with University of Chicago, industry professionals & Jigsaw faculty.

Faculty (Rating 4.7): They have a faculty to student ratio of 1:1, with a batch size of between 30-50. All the University of Chicago faculty have PhD and multiple years of experience in industry and research. It is first analytics course in India to bring faculty from a college in USA, which is amongst the top three.

External Collaboration (Rating 4.7): The program offers best of both worlds with instructors from University of Chicago, industry experts from Jigsaw and analytics practitioners from IBM coming together to deliver a great learning experience.

Brand Value (Rating 4.8): Jigsaw Academy has been a pioneer in Indian analytics education and its collaboration University of Chicago, US, has added to its brand value. With projects and hiring from the likes of IBM, Fractal, Analytics Edge etc., they have an alumni base of over 40,000 students.

Other Attributes (Rating 4.5): It provides extensive placement assistance with exclusive job postings, mock interviews, question banks and live contests. Multiple industry speakers across all contact sessions, live capstone projects, soft skill training, LMS are some of its other features.

The overall rating for University of Chicago is 4.68

3. PG Diploma program in Data Science in association with IIIT- UpGrad

• Headquarter: Mumbai
• Cities of Operation: Online, Global
• Duration of Program: 11 months
• No. of hours: 500 hours of online learning
• Mode of Delivery: Online. 90% of the lectures are asynchronous in nature, delivered by industry experts and leading faculty, 10% of learner time is spent clarifying academic doubts.
• Cost of the Program: INR 2.25 Lakhs

UpGrad, founded by media stalwart Ronnie Screwvala, has successfully launched programs in data science, big data engineering, software engineering, digital marketing, product management, and entrepreneurship, in collaboration with leading Indian and foreign universities such as BITS Pilani, Cambridge University, and IIIT Bangalore, among others.

Course Content (Rating 4.7): The program offers the right blend of statistical know-how, technological expertise, and business knowledge. It has been designed along with IIIT Bangalore and multiple industry leaders. It covers areas of data management, statistics and exploratory data analysis, machine learning, big data analytics.

Pedagogy (Rating 4.5): The learning experience has been designed keeping in mind the working professionals. The teaching style is case-led, wherein faculty and industry experts use a series of industry-relevant examples to teach complex data science and analytics concepts.

Faculty (Rating 4.6): 67% of its faculties are with PhD and 94.4% with industry experience. Of the 18 faculty members who have worked closely with UpGrad to design the course, 14 are working in or have worked in the analytics industry.

External Collaboration (Rating 4.6): The program has established flagship partnerships with analytics leaders such as Uber, Genpact, Fractal Analytics and Gramener. Further, it has been built in collaboration with 30+ analytics industry experts from leading corporations.

Brand Value (Rating 4.4): Along with a collaboration with IIIT Bangalore, Upgrad has partnered with more than 50 companies such as the likes of Star TV, Disney, Google, Microsoft, to develop program content and provide mentorship to students.

Other Attributes (Rating 4.6): Career support is provided as a part of this program along with relevant preparatory material to help learners understand the industry landscape, build their resumes, and prepare for interviews. It also conducts a series of offline events known as the ‘Basecamp’. UpGrad’s proprietary technology platform hosts all the recorded video content, reading materials, assessments, projects and live sessions in a systematic manner.

The overall rating for UpGrad is 4.57

4. Executive Program in Data Science using Excel & R- Talent Edge by XLRI Jamshedpur

• Headquarter: Gurgaon
• Cities of Operation: Online/Global
• Duration of Program: 5 months
• Mode of Delivery: Online
• Cost of the Program: 70,000+taxes

Talentedge is an Ed-Tech firm and amongst the first to have brought the ‘Live & Interactive’ anywhere learning in digital format. It offers courses jointly with world leading institutes and corporates, enabling working professionals to plan their future course of action and fast track their careers.

Course Content (Rating 4.5): The program content and structure is designed entirely by XLRI and provides hands on exposure to popular business analytics tools like excel and R.

Pedagogy (Rating 4.4): The classes are conducted through live lectures that is beamed online via internet to student desktops/laptops or classrooms using Talentedge’s Direct To Device platform. The pedagogy comprises of lectures, case studies, interactive sessions, project work and class exercises imparted by XLRI’s faculty.

Faculty (Rating 4.5): Lectures are imparted by eminent faculty from XLRI and Industry experts. One of their prominent faculties is Dr. Soumyakanti Chakraborty, Fellow (IIM Calcutta), B.Tech (Calcutta University), XLRI Jamshedpur

External Collaboration (Rating 4.4): They have an external collaboration with XLRI, one of India’s leading management school based in Jamshedpur. They also have many corporate alliances with industry.

Brand Value (Rating 4.6): XLRI is acknowledged as India’s oldest business management school and with its single vision of Magis, i.e., pursuit of excellence, it has been focusing well on three areas academic excellence, personal values and social concern.

Other Attributes (Rating 4.2):  They have a periodic evaluations built in through the duration of course which may be in the form of quiz, assignment, project or other objective/subjective assessments as relevant and applicable to the program.

The overall rating for Talent Edge is 4.43

5. Executive Program in Business Analytics (EPBA)- MISB Bocconi

• Headquarter: Bengaluru
• Cities of Operation: Mumbai
• Duration of Program: 10 months with 2-year access to Jigsaw LMS
• No. of hours: 650+ hours (189 hours of in-person training + 60 hours of live online + 300+ hours of recorded videos + 100+ hours on capstone project)
• Mode of Delivery: Both/Blended
• Cost of the Program: INR 6.4 Lakhs + Taxes

The Executive Program in Business Analytics launched by MISB Bocconi, the world’s only offshore presence of Università Bocconi, and and India’s best-ranked data analytics training institutes, Jigsaw Academy.

Course Content (Rating 4.4): With an average work experience of almost 15 years for the batch, the EPBA is amongst the most sought after programs in the country for senior professionals. In line with its target audience, the curriculum of this program is more focused on breadth rather than depth. This program will train you for a leadership role in analytics rather than an entry level role.

Pedagogy (Rating 4.4): The EPBA is focused on bring top class faculty to India to teach the analytics program. The teaching includes in-person classes with Bocconi faculty, industry professionals and Jigsaw faculty.

Faculty (Rating 4.6): They have a faculty to student ration of 1:1, with a batch size of around 35. All SDA Bocconi faculty have PhD and multiple years of experience in industry & research, and have been involved with startups and corporate giants. It is the first program in analytics to bring faculty from a European and global top 10 university to India.

External Collaboration (Rating 4.5): The course is offered in collaboration with SDA Bocconi, Milan, that is ranked among the top 10 business schools globally. The professors from Bocconi, Milan fly down to teach. They also have tie-ups with Axtria, Analytics Edge, Tata Motors, Smart Cube, Kainoos, Data Semantics for projects and hiring.

Brand Value (Rating 4.4): Jigsaw Academy has been a pioneer in Indian analytics education and its collaboration MISB Bocconi has made it one of the preferred choice of students, universities and companies. With projects and hiring from the likes of IBM, Fractal, Analytics Edge etc., they have an alumni base of over 40,000 students.

Other Attributes (Rating 4.2): It provides placement assistance, exclusive job posting, mock interviews, question banks, live contests. It also provides Amazon cloud based virtual labs for R, Python, and Big Data available 24×7 to all students. It also has live capstone project and soft skills training for presentations.

The overall rating for MISB Bocconi is 4.42

6. PGP in Business Analytics- Aegis School Of Business

• Headquarter: Mumbai
• Cities of Operation: Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Online
• Duration of Program: 11 months
• No. of hours: 800 hours
• Mode of Delivery: Online/ Classroom
• Cost of the Program: Online- 2.75 + Taxes, Classroom- Bangalore- 3.6 Lakhs + Taxes, Pune-3 Lakhs+Taxes, Mumbai- 4.5 Lakhs + Taxes

In 2015 Aegis and IBM collaborated to launch, India’s first Data Science Program known as Post Graduate Program in Data Science, Business Analytics and Big Data. IBM has set up Business Analytics Lab and Cloud Computing Lab at Aegis Campus.

Course Content (Rating 4.5): The core course includes Statistics and probability, R and Python for Data Science, Hadoop, big data with Apache Spark, machine learning for data science, IBM Watson analytics, business use cases of big data and data science and much more. Whereas the elective course comprises of Scala, Qliksense, marketing analytics, social media analytics, machine learning with Microsoft Azure, MongoDB, Apache Hive, Apache Pig, fundamental of financial statement analytics, big data on AWS: Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), amongst others.

Pedagogy (Rating 4.3): The program is delivered using an innovative, experiential learning methodology that includes classroom lectures by Aegis faculties, IBM experts and industry experts engaged in real life data science projects providing the theoretical and in-depth conceptual knowledge.

Faculty (Rating 4.4): They have a faculty to student ratio of 1:4 with 17 faculties with PhD and 41 with industry experience

External Collaboration (Rating 4.5): In 2015 Aegis joined hands with IBM to offer full time and executive post graduate program in data science, business analytics and big data and PGP/EPGP in cyber security. Another collaboration is with NVIDIA DLI to conduct and impart training on artificial intelligence and deep learning. It also has partnership with MTNL, a leading Govt. of Indian telecom service provider and collaborations with the various companies.

Brand Value (Rating 4.3): With its candidate’s placed in 45+ companies such as Accenture, Aditya Birla, Suzlon, Fractal, IBM, HDFC, Ford Automotive, and more, it speaks of the brand value it has.

Other Attributes (Rating 4.4):  It has a career management center that provides all students placement and paid internship opportunities. Aegis-IBM has setup state of the art lab for the participants and the faculties, which helps them to work on various data science tools, platforms, IBM specific software and projects.

The overall rating for Aegis School of Business is 4.40

7. Post Graduate Diploma In Data Science- Times Pro

• Headquarter: Mumbai
• Cities of Operation: 20 cities pan India including Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Chennai, Lucknow, Delhi
• Duration of Program: 6 months
• No. of hours: 380 hours
• Mode of Delivery: Classroom/ Online

Times Professional Learning (TPL) is a unique training & education initiative from Bennett, Coleman Co. Ltd. (the Times Group) that aspires to solve the skills puzzle in India by adopting dynamic learning methodologies. TPL has an expertise in providing training solutions in the area of Big data, Data Sciences, Data Analytics & Artificial Intelligence.

Course Content (Rating 4.4): PGADS program is designed for experienced professionals who want to gain a deep understanding of how to use data as a strategic asset. This program teaches students both to understand the role of evidence-based data in decision-making and to leverage data as a strategic asset.

Pedagogy (Rating 4.3): The program is delivered by a team of leading faculty members and industry experts, Industry practitioners in live classroom instruction along with hands-on sessions. The program is designed on a schedule that minimizes disruption of work and personal pursuits.

Faculty (Rating 4.3): The faculty to student ratio is 1:15 with number of faculties with PhD to be 7 and those with 14 with the industry experience.

External Collaboration (Rating 4.6): They have partnered with NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI) that offers hands-on training for developers, data scientists and researchers looking to solve world’s most challenging problems with deep learning.

Brand Value (Rating 4.2): Times Pro is an initiative by the Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. (BCCL) group, which has 45 leading brands across sectors and a turnover of approx. U.S. $1.5 Bn. Its collaboration with NVIDIA, a market leader in deep learning and AI also speaks for its brand value.

Other Attributes (Rating 4.3): They provide placement assistance to candidates who have completed the course with them. They also have well equipped labs at each center and provide laptops to students during the course duration.

The overall rating for Times Pro is 4.35

8. PGDM/MBA in Business Analytics- Reva University

• Headquarter: Bengaluru
• Cities of Operation: Bengaluru
• Duration of Program: PGDM – 1 year, MBA – 2 years
• No. of hours: PGDM – 560 hours, MBA – 960 hours
• Mode of Delivery: Hybrid program with weekend classes and online LMS support
• Cost of the Program: PGDM- INR 2.8 Lakhs, MBA- INR 3.8 Lakhs

RACE, an initiative of REVA University, was created to develop visionary enterprise leaders for corporates. It offers a range of techno-functional programs specially designed to suit the needs of working professionals to enhance their careers. RACE currently offers both long and short-term analytics programs for working professionals.

Course Content (Rating 4.3): The program covers descriptive, predictive, prescriptive and cognitive analytics in real-life scenarios. The PGDM/MBA in Business Analytics in association with IBM is a 12/24 months’ modular program in business analytics, in association with IBM.

Pedagogy (Rating 4.3): They have a 100% outcome driven/skill based program designed for working professionals to enhance their career in mid and senior positions in business analytics. The program is completely practical and lab based using either proprietary or open software used in the analytics market today.

Faculty (Rating 4.4): The faculty to student ratio 1:4, and the number of faculties with PhD is 3, while with the industry experience is 10.

External Collaboration (Rating 4.5): The program is offered in association with IBM. Other partners include Jigsaw Academy (online partner), Predictive Analytics/ Let’s learn analytics Ltd. (Delivery partner) and Datawise Inc. (Delivery partner).

Brand Value (Rating 4.1): RACE is a part of Reva university established under the Government of Karnataka Act 80 of the year. The founders of REVA University, with a missionary zeal, visionary outlook and philanthropic approach coupled with four decades long entrepreneurial leadership are recognised as leading edupreneurs creating world class education. 

Other Attributes (Rating 4.2): They provide 100% placement assistance with lateral placement opportunities. Each participant gets an industry mentor who helps in improving their learning and explore placement opportunities. They also conduct hackathons and analytics competitions.

The overall rating for Reva University is 4.30

9. Executive PGDM in Business Analytics – IFIM Business School

• Headquarter: Bengaluru
• Cities of Operation: Bengaluru
• Duration of Program: 15 months
• Mode of Delivery: Hybrid model (live streaming of lectures + classroom teaching)
• Cost of the Program: INR 3.75 Lakhs

IFIM Business School, Bangalore, offers a range of options for executive education including an extremely well received AICTE approved 15 month EPGDM-Business Analytics offered in collaboration with IBM.

Course Content (Rating 4.1): Business Analytics course of IFIM imbibes skills, technologies and practices that are at par with the industry requirement. Since it caters to different industries and numerous domain at work, the curriculum offered at IFIM brings in a holistic knowledge to the student, and has been designed by industry experts with the vast knowledge in data mining field.

Pedagogy (Rating 4.3): The best practices in terms of pedagogy includes live case studies, practical hands on exposure to various tools and software such as RStudio, Hadoop, SPSS, Tableau, Advanced EXCEL, SQL Cognos, Power BI and Open Source predictive analytics tools like Rattle, KNIME (Text Mining & Deep Learning) and Open Source Text Mining.

Faculty (Rating 4.4): With a faculty to student ratio of 1:15, they have a total of 6 faculties with PhD and 13 with industry experience.

External Collaboration (Rating 4.3): IFIM has created a business analytics course for students and working professionals to learn and apply analytics solutions and solve real-world problems with IBM and open source tools.

Brand Value (Rating 4.2): IFIM Business School, Bangalore was founded in the year 1995 and has over the years grown to be amongst the top ranked business schools in India.

Other Attributes (Rating 4.3): The Institute has a dedicated Placement team which handles the training and placement related needs for different courses. It recently organized its 10th International Conference on Digital Business: New Frontiers in Management with its specific theme on Business Analytics & Big Data in Digital Business.

The overall rating for IFIM is 4.27

10. Predictive Business Analytics – Bridge School of Management

• Headquarter: Gurgaon
• Cities of Operation: Gurgaon
• Duration of Program: 11 Months
• No. of hours: Online- 440 + hours, Classroom- 260 + hours
• Mode of Delivery: Blended
• Cost of the Program: 4.2 INR Lakhs + Taxes

Bridge School of Management is a venture of HT Media Ltd., India’s second largest and most trusted media company. The Predictive Business Analytics program is offered in partnership with Northwestern University, USA and provides placement assistance to all successful graduates

Course Content (Rating 4.2): It offers a blended program to suit working professionals. The Predictive Business Analytics course at Bridge is strategically designed to provide strategic knowledge of Analytics and give hands on experience on using tools and mining insights.

Pedagogy (Rating 4.3): Pedagogy is a blended format with flipped classroom model. Students take face to face sessions over the weekend with industry practitioner faculty, and the sessions are delivered with the help of case studies, live -industry examples, numerical and practical coding sessions.

Faculty (Rating 4.3): The faculty to student ratio is 1:20, with 20 faculties with relevant industry experience. All the of them are industry experts with 10+ years of experience, from corporates like AMEX, RBL, SBI cards etc.

External Collaboration (Rating 4.3): They have collaborated with Northwestern University (School of professional Studies), USA

Brand Value (Rating 4.1): Being in the industry for last few years, they have been able to place candidates in companies like HCL, Policy Bazaar, American Express, Indigo, Hero, Luminous and many more. Backed by India’s leading media company HT Media and Global Education group-Apollo Global (USA), it has been delivering innovative learning environment for the working professionals.

Other Attributes (Rating 4.3): They provide 100% Placement Assistance. Each batch goes through a series of tool learning along with a live project.

The overall rating for Bridge School of Management is 4.25

Your Opinion Matters

The post Top 10 Executive Analytics Courses in India – Ranking 2017 appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Keeping in line with our recently published ranking on top 10 executive analytics courses in India, we bring to you another ranking for full time courses in analytics and related domain. While both executive and full time courses offer an extensive training on the analytical, statistical and data science tools, the difference lies mostly in the target candidates. On one hand, where executive courses are designed mostly for working professionals to accommodate skill upgradation along with their working hours, full time courses are best suited for fresher and those willing to take a sabbatical from their work to excel in the area of analytics.

With this year’s ranking, which often remains a daunting task for candidates to chose amongst a plethora of options, we have tried to ease out their efforts by rating these courses on the basis of course content, pedagogy, external collaborations, faculty, brand value and other attributes like placement assistance, LMS, events, virtual labs and others. The parameters have been rated on a scale of 1-5 (where 1 is for Worst and 5 is for Best) individually to arrive at an overall ranking. The study also considered students as well as expert feedback before arriving at Top 6 Full Time Analytics Courses in India – Ranking 2017.

1. PG Diploma in Business Analytics – IIM Calcutta, ISI Kolkata & IIT Kharagpur (Tri-Institute course)

• Headquarter: Kolkata and Kharagpur
• Year of inception: 2015
• Cities of Operation: Kolkata and Kharagpur
• Mode of Delivery: Classroom
• Duration of Program: 24 months (18- Classroom, 6 – Internship)
• No. of hours: 30 classroom hours a week

The two years’ full time residential program is offered by ISI, IIT KGP and IIMC. It provides students a lifetime experience of learning from not one but three of the premier institutions of the country. They develop a strong business acumen at IIM Calcutta, a sound statistics background at ISI and at IIT Kharagpur they learn to apply various machine learning techniques.

Course Content (Rating 4.9): The first semester at Indian Statistical Institute consists of 5 courses including statistical structures in data, stochastic process, inference, computational data science and DBMS. The second semester at IIT Kharagpur explores machine learning techniques, time series models, cloud computing and information retrieval. The third semester is offered by IIM Calcutta and covers a range of topics from business data mining, categorical data analytics, product management etc.

Pedagogy (Rating 4.9): The teaching methods and curriculum at the three institutes complement each other to give students the most comprehensive learning of business analytics. The course finds the optimal balance between the theoretical concepts of data science and their applications to business problems. Students get to regularly interact with industry experts through invited talks and guest lectures, where experts talk about latest trends and challenges in the industry. The course leverages the best of the three institutes in their respective fields of expertise, i.e., statistics, technology and business.

Faculty (Rating 4.9): No. of faculties with PhD in ISI are 201, IIMC is 81 and IITKGP is 57, whereas those with industry experience are 42, 3 and 8 respectively. All the faculties teaching PGDBA have a PhD in their respective fields from reputed institutes all around the globe. Students have the opportunity to interact and participate in projects with any faculty in the 3 institutes at any point of time during the course.

External Collaboration (Rating 4.8):  The inception of PGDBA was borne out of a collaboration between the industry and academia. A day-long conclave held at IIM Calcutta on January 2015.

Brand Value (Rating 4.9): Indian Statistical Institute(ISI) is one of the oldest and most prestigious institutions devoted to the research, teaching and application of statistics, social sciences and natural sciences. The Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur(IIT KGP), is the first of the IITs to be established in 1951. Whereas, the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIMC) was established as the first national institute for Postgraduate studies and Research in Management by the Government of India in November 1961.

Other Attributes (Rating 4.9): The course has a mandatory 6-month internship at the end of the course, assistance for which is provided by the institutes. Virtual lab events consist of simulation of management game to get hands-on knowledge of industry growth and estimation techniques so as to allocate a company’s budget accordingly. Data Science Laboratory(DSL) at IIT Kharagpur with multiple GPU’s is one of the best in the country to process big data and carry out analysis on the same. The tri-institute nature of the course helps the students to coordinate with students from other courses of the three Institutes in various events.

The overall rating is 4.88

2. PGP in Business Analytics – Praxis Business School

• Headquarter: Kolkata
• Year of inception: 2007
• Cities of Operation: Kolkata, Bangalore
• Mode of Delivery: Classroom
• Duration of Program: 9 months
• No. of hours: 500 hours of classroom training + projects and assignments

Praxis Business School with campuses in Kolkata & Bangalore, was established in Kolkata in 2007 with an initial academic collaboration with XLRI and offers full time courses in business management, business analytics and weekend classroom programs in big data analytics. The Postgraduate Program in Business Analytics has two intakes in a year – January and July, at Kolkata and Bangalore.

Course Content (Rating 4.6): The full time course is a rigorous program that aims at equipping students with the tools, techniques and skills to enable a seamless absorption into the domain of analytics and grow into the roles of Data Scientists.

Pedagogy (Rating 4.6): Business Analytics lies at the intersection of three key disciplines, namely statistics, programming and the targeted business domain and the program at Praxis is designed to address all three in significant depth.

Faculty (Rating 4.7): The faculty to student ratio is 1:8. Almost 16% of faculties are with PhD, whereas 92% with industry experience. Dr. Mukherjee, the Director of the program, is a thought leader in this field and features among the top-ten academicians in analytics.

External Collaboration (Rating 4.6): There is a considerable participation of the industry in design and delivery of the Analytics program at Praxis Business School. The curriculum has emerged after considerable discussion with industry practitioners. ICICI Bank and PricewaterhouseCoopers are knowledge supporters in the program.

Brand Value (Rating 4.5): Praxis has witnessed a significant growth in its enrolments with enrolments in 2017 witnessing a growth of 232% over 2016 numbers. Its alumni are settled well in the industry, and many of them have been able to bag excellent profiles such as consultant, business advisory analyst in Accenture, senior business analyst in Flipkart, head of data sciences in Yatra.com and others.

Other Attributes (Rating 4.6): The program enables an aspirant to get his/her first job in analytics, and have the right curriculum, pedagogy, student profile and placement process in place, so that placements will happen. They have virtual labs where SAS, R, Python are set up on student laptops.

The overall rating is 4.60

3. PG Diploma in Data Science- Manipal Global Academy Of Data Science

• Headquarter: Bangalore
• Year of inception: 2016
• Cities of Operation: Bangalore
• Mode of Delivery: Primarily classroom based
• Duration of Program: 9 months + 2 months’ internship (on stipend)
• No. of hours: 360 hours of classroom and 490 hours of tutorials and hands-on learning

Manipal Global Academy of Data Science offers cutting-edge learning solutions in the data science field and is backed by Manipal Global Education Services (MaGE), a pioneer in higher education and allied services. Full-time PGD in Data Science mainly focuses on fresh college graduates interested in building their careers in the field of data science. The diploma is awarded by Manipal University. 

Course Content (Rating 4.5): This program is designed with an optimal blend of rigour and relevance and includes in-depth content from foundation to advanced level. The course content includes programming for data science, machine learning, database management systems, data visualization, advanced big data technologies, exploratory data analysis and electives.  

Pedagogy (Rating 4.4): The lectures are delivered by industry experts and practitioners

Lectures delivered by industry experts, practitioners, where students are exposed to data science ecosystem through case studies, industry visits, hackathons, webinars.

Faculty (Rating 4.6): The full time faculty to student ratio is 2:45. 20 % of faculty have a PhD, 50 % of faculty have 5+ years of experience, whereas 84% of faculty have 10 + years of experience.

External Collaboration (Rating 4.5): The institute has alliances and partnerships with both industry and academia. Industry collaboration includes those with Genpact, Experian and Big Data University (an IBM led initiative), whereas academic collaborations are with Manipal University, Deakin University.

Brand Value (Rating 4.6): Manipal Global Education Services is a leading India-headquartered international provider of high-quality higher education and enterprise learning services.

Other Attributes (Rating 4.4): It has a dedicated placement cell with intensive soft skill training, CV and interview preparations. The students work on a virtual machine set up individually or as teams for each course they undergo. It conducts hackathons and outbound learning for team building. It provides 24/7 access to content through LMS.

The overall rating is 4.50

4. PGP in Business Analytics- International Institute of Digital Technologies

• Headquarter: Tirupati
• Year of inception: 2016
• Cities of Operation: Tirupati
• Mode of Delivery: Classroom training aided with online tutorials
• Duration of Program: 11 months
• No. of hours: 560 hours

IIDT is set up under APEITA (Andhra Pradesh Electronics & IT Agency), an autonomous society of the Government of Andhra Pradesh to promote Information Technology and Electronics industry. It currently offers 1 year PGP in Business Analytics in partnership with Praxis Business School and 1 year PGP in Cyber Security in partnership with Gujrat Forensic University.

Course Content (Rating 4.5): The course is divided into four terms. The first term includes subjects like excel, business analytics approach, machine learning, statistics, R, SAS, RDBMS, managerial communication. Second terms consist of introduction to Python, advanced statistics, big data/spark, web analytics, retail analytics, econometrics, business finance accounting.

Pedagogy (Rating 4.4): With a focus on transformational pedagogical approach, the model is focused on developing the digital DNA through a combination of personalized learning and collaborative approaches like classroom coaching, live projects and industry driven research. Face-to-face classroom training creates in-depth absorption of the theoretical concepts while the lab sessions aid the understanding with hands-on practice.

Faculty (Rating 4.5): It has a faculty to student ratio of 8:22, with two faculties having PhD and all but one faculty member have a considerable industry experience. They invite guest lectures from industry through their network.

External Collaboration (Rating 4.4): They have collaborations with multiple bodies including corporate entities to get more exposure to the students. Some of the mentor organizations are APEITA, Govt of AP, Citi Bank, Bhaarathi Axa, Syf, Edge Folio, Solix, Scalend, Mindtree, Vasar Labs.

Brand Value (Rating 4.5): IIDT is an initiative by the government of AP, under the dynamic leadership of Honourable Chief Minister, Sri. Nara Chandrababu Naidu Garu, who has initiated the establishment of IIDT, under the guidance of Mr. J. A. Chowdary, Special Chief Secretary & IT Advisor to the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh.

Other Attributes (Rating 4.4): IIDT collaborates with its academic partner, Praxis Business School, to offer a rigorous campus placement program.  It provides both physical and virtual labs for students’ practical sessions. CISCO and KII Corporation have set up their Centers of Excellence (CoEs) at IIDT. IIDT with Govt. of AP collaboration conducts own events. Currently the classes are stored in CLOUD to access for later use for our students.

The overall rating is 4.45

5. Big Data & Visual Analytics – SP Jain School of Global Management

• Headquarter: Dubai
• Year of inception: 2004
• Cities of Operation: Mumbai
• Mode of Delivery: Classroom
• Duration of Program: 6 months
• No. of hours: 400

An Australian business school of Indian origin, with campuses in Dubai, Singapore and Sydney, the School offers a plethora of undergraduate, postgraduate, professional and doctoral programs with a motive of crafting leaders for the 21st century workplace. Their full-time MBA and Global MBA programs have significant recognition as evinced through global rankings.

Course Content (Ranking 4.5): From data mining, machine learning and cloud computing to Linux, algorithmic training and Internet of Things, SP Jain’s BDVA program takes you deep into every aspect of big data. And, not simply from a theoretical perspective, but also through practical, real-world projects and industry internships.

Pedagogy (Ranking 4.3): The full time program has three important pedagogical aspects. The learning is based on three pillars of big data mining, machine learning and cloud computing platforms. BDVA program starts from basics and fundamentals and includes hand-on practical, real-world projects and industry internships.

Faculty (Ranking 4.5): It has one faculty for every three students. No. of faculties with PhD is 7 and that with industry experience is 10.

External Collaboration (Ranking 4.3): It has external collaborations with technology providers like Google, Microsoft, Tableau, Qlik, IBM, SAP, SAS. Many corporates help them bring best practices and up-skilling orientations such as Capgemini, PWC, Deloitte, TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Tech Mahindra, L&T Infotech.

Brand Value (Ranking 4.6): S P Jain is registered as a Higher Education Provider in Australia and its world class business courses are accredited by the Department of Education/Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), Australia, and licensed by the Council of Private Education, Singapore and the Knowledge and Human Development Authority, Dubai. Apart from this, its industry association and placement speaks of its reputation.

Other Attributes (Ranking 4.4): The institute offers placement assistance to students completing a course with them. Other facilities are virtual labs like Google cloud platform and IBM labs, hackathons, workshops, info sessions, master class, Google classroom etc.

The overall rating is 4.43

6. Master of Business Administration (Data Sciences and Data Analytics)- Symbiosis Centre for Information Technology

• Headquarter: Pune
• Year of inception: 1999
• Cities of Operation: Pune
• Mode of Delivery: Classroom
• Duration of Program: Full Time Two Year residential programme
• No. of hours: 1500 hours

SCIT is committed to nurturing genuine IT talent to help them become future leaders in Information Technology arena. The institute supports their transformation with innovative teaching-learning methodology, state-of-the-art computer labs, platform for peer learning and opportunities to learn management in real time.

Course Content (Rating 4.3): It is the only B-School offering MBA (DS & DA) in India, aiming at developing management professionals for data sciences and data analytics stream. The program enables students to approach data using scientific methods and develop the ability to think about the real problems that need to be solved, not to simply find technical solutions.

Pedagogy (Rating 4.2): The teaching pedagogy consists of teaching through PowerPoint presentations, lectures, videos, white papers, case studies, MOOC courses, Open source software tools.

Faculty (Rating 4.3): The faculty to student ratio is 1:12. They have two faculty members with PhD and others with relevant academic/ industry experience.

External Collaboration (Rating 4.3): Cummins had reviewed their curriculum and participated in providing and conducting use case presentations in data mining, multivariate statistics.

Brand Value (Rating 4.6): SCIT is a premier IT Business School nurturing genuine IT talent. Symbiosis Centre for Information Technology, a constituent of Symbiosis International University has been a pioneer and a leader in imparting education in the niche area of Information Technology Business Management in India for more than a decade.

Other Attributes (Rating 4.1): They provide placement assistance and use N computing machines in computer labs. They conduct National Seminars and students get to participate in interesting summits across the country.

The overall rating is 4.30

Your Opinion Matters

The post Top 6 Full Time Analytics Courses In India- Ranking 2017 appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

India has been quick to get onto the robotics wagon. Every major contact center has a project focused on RPA. The BPO industry was hesitant for a very short time while they mulled the erosion of man-hour based revenue that they generate. However they quickly reconciled to the fact that

• RPA allows them to offer outcome based contracts at lower cost to service. (as against FTE billing or transaction count billing)
• If they don’t do it and enable their clients, the clients themselves will.

So the BPO industry is actively adopting RPA to add value to their customer’s processes while cutting down operational costs.

We spoke with Sunil Aryan, Director Practice and Sales leader for Asia region at Verint about robotics and PRA for Contact Centre Industry in India. Sunil Aryan, comes with close to a decade of experience in the field of customer experience strategies, automation and workforce optimisation. Sunil is keenly interested in demystifying the possibilities of RPA and AI.

AIMAnalytics India Magazine: Robotics/ Robotics Process Automation (RPA) can these terms be used interchangeably? If not what is the difference?

SASunil Aryan: Robotics is the general term used for synthetic systems, generally mechanical, designed to autonomously complete repetitive task/s. Automation is a broader term which refers to machine based autonomous work functions. It is about rules based automation of processes, which are moderately complex, fundamentally rules-based and don’t require human decision making and judgment. Such processes can be automated partially or, in many cases completely. Traditional approaches to process automation involve tightly coupled integrations developed by expensive resources, with inflexible designs, making it difficult and expensive to automate a large number of processes.

RPA on the other hand refers more specifically to the desktop process automation and is generally associated with computer based processes. So it is a kind of subset of general robotics term. However the industry uses this interchangeably.

RPA is best utilised in business units that require  high volume repetitive, rules-based procedures. RPA completely replace the need for manual processing of specific tasks or entire multistep processes within a functional area, automating them while operating around the clock. The general function of such ‘robots’ is to mimic the desktop activities of a person, data manipulation and sometimes even communicating to complete a particular process/transaction, thereby replacing the need for human time and effort.  RPA can be as simple as replicating mouse movement & clicks, copy paste etc. to advanced cognitive robotics functions which can cover rules based decision making as part of the process completion activity.

It can be integrated into existing manual process to assist with the on-boarding and upskilling of employees or deployed as a stand-alone solution where manual intervention is not required. Both scenarios can deliver dramatic improvements in productivity, compliance, quality and cost-savings as well as being a significant contributor to customer satisfaction.

AIM: Most times Robotics is spoken with reference to replacing human man power; what is the solution from Verint doing?

SA: This seems to be the general focus area of industry; replace a person with robot and the job is done! However it is difficult if not impossible to replace the human element end-to-end just yet. Simplest scenario for this is that human resources cover the exceptions when the robot fails to execute a function for some reason. Also note that most RPA are not ready to assimilate work like humans do. The work needs to be offered in a very specific manner.

I would opine that a better objective, at least to start with, would be to focus on repetitive low skill requirement function and gradually work your way up to more cognitive functions. This allows the organization to adapt to the work and social change that replacement of human functions brings in. Verint has recognised this very early on and therefore offers 2 distinct flavours of RPA.

• Robotic Process Automation solution addresses the complete robotic automation of a desktop function. This solution comprises software robots that have potential to completely replace the need for manual processing of specific tasks or entire multistep processes within a functional area, automating them and operating around the clock. These functions generally run in virtualized instances on servers
• Process Assistant(VPA) can help employees complete tasks faster and more accurately by providing guidance and automation wizards that overlay applications, showing staff exactly what to do, preventing them from proceeding in some situations, and even performing the work for them in some situations. This solution can help free your organization from complex application integrations, ongoing training for infrequently used processes, and even speed up onboarding for new employees.  By very nature of the solution, it runs of the employee desktops and acts as a assistant or co-worker.

AIM: How can Robotics Process Automation(RPA)  provide a contact center agent with insights and information to help make customer interactions more seamless and streamlined?

SA: As we discussed earlier, the function of RPA is to automate desktop based processes. If we are cognizant of the operational area and use case, there is no reason why call center agents cannot benefit from these solutions. The functional vision here is to support rather than replace the agent. The Process Assistant is designed exactly for such operations. In the middle of a call the agent can offload some of the repetitive work to suitable robot “assistant” using VPA.

AIM: How would Robotics positively impact Contact Centre parameters like FCR and NPS?

SA: RPA is excellent enabler for both the front office, call centres and the backoffice. Robot assistants enable the agents to focus on helping the customers while the robots execute mundane repetitive tasks. What people also tend to forget is that for most organizations the completion of work actually takes place in the backoffice. By employing RPA, enterprises not only benefit from the lower cost to serve they also ensure that the work is executed with higher quality and lower compliance risks. In a nut shell RPA can act as enabler for organization wide end to end NPS.

AIM: How can Robotics aid in agent training? How can it bring down the man hours spent on training? What is the average training cost for an agent?

SA: For critical tasks that aren’t performed frequently enough for employees to maintain competence, these guidance wizards can help an employee complete a task quickly and accurately. For tasks that involve extensive or repetitive data entry, automation can be added to greatly speed up work item completion, as well as reduce errors.   For example, if the same information needs to be entered into several different applications to set up a new customer account, Verint Process Automation can be used to provide automation of that data entry and present a guidance script to the user.

Guidance and Automation scripts are generated and maintained centrally and distributed to employee desktops. Statistics about usage and completion of tasks with the scripts is maintained so that administrators can review and make updates as needed.

The post Demystifying Robotics for Indian Contact Centre Industry – A Conversation with Sunil Aryan of Verint appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Innovation, competition, and productivity – these are the buzzwords that define the direction of business today, much of which is being driven by Big Data and Analytics. Data is emerging as a critical corporate asset, redefining core operations, core competencies and business models, resulting in a considerable increase in the number and variety of Big Data certification courses available online.

Securing the right talent to fill skill gaps is the biggest hurdle that companies face while trying to integrate data and analytics into their existing operations. Here’s where a certification can play a key role in helping existing personnel within a company acquire these crucial skills, expanding their repertoire and helping them fulfill multiple roles within the organization framework.

Merits of pursuing a Big Data Certification

Being certified is a great way to make a career shift to a promising field. Certifications have long since been a reliable proof of competency and an accepted norm in the fast-changing technology world. When technologies keep changing every few months, it is challenging to complete full-fledged degree courses and become competent. Certifications are the way to go, acting as speedy and practical “crash courses” to build the required talent. So here is why you should consider learning the tricks of the data and analytics trade, by doing a big data certification, today!

• Positive optimism about the technology: An IDC forecast states that the Big Data market is predicted to be worth $46.34 billion by 2018, with great prospects in the areas of Big Data related infrastructure, software and services over the next five years. IDC has also predicted an annual growth rate of 23.1% over the period of 2014-2019 and annual spends to reach $48.6 billion in 2019. These numbers ooze optimism. In fact, the public sector too is awakening to the advantages of data and analytics, and formulating a number of information security policies and programs to give impetus to technological and skill-building investments. Big Data is now seen moving out of the experimental phase and taking on real projects.
• Strong salary prospects: The growing attention to Big Data and Analytics is creating a talent flux- organizations want to propel forward their Big Data expertise, but the market just does not have the volumes and/or quality of talent to meet these newfound burgeoning demands. The International Data Corporation (IDC)³ has predicted a talent need by 2018: 181,000 people with deep analytical skills, and five times for data management and interpretation skills. This skew in demand-supply gives data professionals a financial-edge over run-of-the-mill IT professionals. A report by Analytics India Magazine in association with AnalytixLabs indicates that the average salaries of Analytics professionals in India stand at Rs. 11.7 lakhs per annum, whereas that of IT professionals is at Rs. 8.65 lakh per annum, Moreover, only 39% of analytics professionals have salaries under 6 Lakhs vs 58% in IT. Thus, you stand to gain financially, provided you have the required professional skills. So, learn all you can and make a financially lucrative career switch!
• Career progression through Big Data certifications: The gain is not only immediate, there is also a long-term logic in learning the ropes of Big Data and Analytics. Doing a Big Data certification is the way to leapfrog your career from a traditional IT job to a futuristic Data Analytics profession. Moreover, you can choose from a number of Big Data certifications according to the career path you wish to adopt- Architecture, Data Science, Business Analytics, Big Data Development (Hadoop, R, Python etc.), Administration- the options are many to suit your preference. Most of these courses have a skill-level based progression from beginner to intermediate to expert, allowing you learning-access to progress fast in your new career. For example, the Big Data Hadoop Developer Certification by Simplilearn helps learners master the concepts of the Hadoop framework, a critical Big Data and Analytics competency.

• You only need a short learning investment: What’s more, there is no need take a career break, go back to college and spend years gaining a degree or diploma in Big Data and Analytics. Big Data and Analytics is a fast-evolving technology – there are little or no pre-requisites in terms of formal education, making it easy for any IT professional to dabble in the field and gain expertise in a matter of few months by doing a Big Data certification Today the learning market offers a range of courses to suit the busy professional. From online learning modules, to self-paced learning, learning has evolved into an experience in itself, and deliver the right market-led skills to help career professionals plug-and-perform into the skill-gaps. Learn while you earn, and advance your career through continuous learning!
• Applicability across various industries: Almost every sector today is looking at leveraging the power of big data and analytics. While industry domain expertise is important, becoming a certified Big Data and Analytics expert means that you have a variety of job opportunities, across industries and need not be constrained by sector. This is important for remaining relevant and flexible in a cut-throat talent market. 

What should you learn?

It is important to choose a Big Data certification that suits your career aspirations. A number of career paths are available within the Big Data and Analytics stream- Developer, Data Architect, Business Analyst, Solutions and Services Expert (for specific branded products), Database Administrator, Data Scientist, Data Engineer, and so on. You need to choose the certification after analyzing what suits you in terms of interest, career progression, opportunities etc. One such learning-solutions provider is Simplilearn, with their wide variety of Big Data certifications such as Big Data Hadoop Architect, Data Scientist, Big Data Hadoop and Spark Developer, Big Data and Hadoop Administrator, etc. The authenticity and usefulness of Simplilearn courses stems from the fact that Ronald van Loon, one of the Top 10 global Big Data influencers, sits on the advisory board and acts as the Course Advisor for Simplilearn. In addition to this, Simplilearn has also launched the JobAssist^TM program to help certified learners find relevant jobs in the domain.

So why wait? Choose your go-to Big Data certification wisely and embark on a refreshing and promising learning path to realize your career dreams.

The post 5 Reasons to do a Big Data certification  appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Courtesy: Sandeep Mittal

The post Toon: Big Data is Cat appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Webinar Session by: Dr. Shailesh Kumar

Topic:  The Evolution of “AI Thinking”: From AI Models to AI Systems

Details to be covered:

• Here we will highlight the “breadth” of algorithms out there in AI/ML

• Why we need so many different varieties of models

• The need to start thinking about an “AI Ecosystem” not as a “Collection of Models” but as a “System of Models” that feed into each other

• Tie this to problems in EdTech, Fleet Management, Driverless cars, and Enterprise applications

For New Folks:

• this talk gives them a birds eye view of the different classes of AI models and why they need to learn enough of them to become useful as Data Scientists

For Data Scientists:

• this talk gives them the next level of thinking where they now know the various modelling tools but don’t know how to put them together to build a complex AI system

Profile of Dr. Shailesh Kumar

Currently:

• Distinguished Scientist and Vice President at Ola Cabs

• Visiting Faculty of Machine Learning at Indian School of Business

A TEDx speaker, Dr. Kumar has been an invited and keynote speaker at a number of public and corporate data science events including the Fifth Elephant, Data Science Congress, and NASSCOM Big Data & Analytics Summit. He serves as a Data Science advisor to a number of Startups, Tech companies, VC’s, and government agencies.

Dr. Kumar was recognised as one of the top ten data scientists in India in 2015 by the Analytics India Magazine. He holds twenty patents and has published twenty international publications and book chapters in these areas.

Dr. Kumar received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Masters in Computer Science, both from the University of Texas at Austin, USA. He received his B-Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University.

Register Link

The post Register for Webinar – The Evolution of “AI Thinking”: From AI Models to AI Systems – Jan 9, 2018 | 3:00 PM appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Data is the new currency and the data whisperer is the new king. The question is no longer if you should upskill with analytics and data science, but what kind of analytics skills you should add to your repertoire.

There is great demand for people who are adept at handling data and can analyze that data for effective decision making. But what does it take to make it to the top in this field? What are the skills needed? Weighing in on this, Snehamoy Mukherjee, Senior Director for large Data Science, Big Data, Machine Learning and Analytics engagements at Axtria, says “We need people with the desire to learn and work hard, which I believe is the most important skill. Everything else, is trainable. On the hard skills front, ability to understand business, apply analytics frameworks to the business problems, think through multiple insights that can be provided to the client, what problems we can solve for them using the data and which algorithms and statistics to apply to which business problem are the skills that students should develop.”

The Analytics Market Today

Be it building a recommendation engine to a chat bot to a market mix model, it’s all about data – and this needs data savvy professionals who can extract insights out of seemingly random data. “The Analytics market in India continues to grow steadily and organically, and that is sound growth. We don’t have a bubble in this industry, where thousands of wannabe analytics shops opened overnight, with crazy funding from private equity or venture capital firms. There is demand for folks with sound analytics skills. There is of course a huge demand in the US market, which gets fulfilled offshore.” says Snehamoy.

There is a wide demand and supply gap between what the industry wants and what the candidates are offering. It is not enough to just know to work with data, but it is essential to also unearth what that data is saying and present it in an understandable manner based on which the management of an organization can take strategic decisions that will drive the company.

Expressing his opinion on the current analytics talent pool, Snehamoy adds, “The quality of Analytics professionals in the talent pool is deteriorating by the day. The reason for this is that with the increase in the volume of analytics workforce, the quality of training that organizations were able to provide in-house earlier as compared to now, which has also deteriorated.”

With the hype and buzz around analytics, a lot of available training in the analytics space has not been focusing on the actual industry needs – and instead been focusing on tool based training, which is not an effective learning methodology. Analytics is all about understanding the underlying concepts and processes, and not just learning to work with one or two tools.

Snehamoy is of the same view. “Instead of structured trainings, organizations are now relying on self-help modules to train the staff, which leaves people to their own means and motivations to learn. This is not ideal. Analytics needs to be taught in a very rigorous manner by people with experience in the field and there are no text books to learn analytics unlike programming or finance,” he says. 

What Needs to Change

What we need is people to learn analytics and data science as applied in the industry, with focus on practical learning. In finding programs geared towards this, Jigsaw Academy’s offerings are in line with what the industry and organizations are seeking. Their Postgraduate Program in Data Science and Machine Learning (PGPDM), a specialized learning program developed in collaboration with University of Chicago Graham School, with added advanced modules in Cognitive Computing from IBM, is a great way to step into the world of data.

The 10-month extensive program is designed for technology professionals and helps them become elite analytics professionals. The PGPDM curriculum covers data modelling and data analytics techniques, through a combination of lectures, a capstone project and assignments. The extremely hands-on nature of the program makes it a unique proposition for any tech professional to upskill and upgrade.

Click here to get more information about the PGPDM delivered right into your inbox.

The post Career in a Rut? Analytics is the Answer appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

As India witnesses another successful year in analytics, what can be a better way than recognising the industry stalwarts who are contributing tremendously in the analytics domain, enabling organisations with their analytics prowess. With companies embracing disruptive technologies in this rapidly evolving business scenario and with a growing relevance for drawing better insights from huge volumes of data, the prominence for companies providing innovative analytics solutions has increased tremendously.

It may be noted that there are 600+ boutique analytics firms in India and with this ever growing number, it has reached global standards in providing state-of-the art analytics services. With these boutique firms, of varying size and team structures being on a constant rise, there is a visible competition in the market to stay ahead of the curve.

Analytics India Magazine brings such 10 leading analytics providers in India that have grabbed a spot for themselves and are helping their customers in deriving data driven decision making. Please note that this list is a replacement of our annual 10 Analytics firms in India you wish you worked for.

The list here (in alphabetical order) comprises of the names that have shown visible growth and achievements in last 1 year, have evangelised analytics within the whole ecosystem in India, thereby pushing the whole industry higher in skill and visibility.

This study has been carried out in collaboration with AnalytixLabs, one of India’s renowned analytics education providers.  

1. Blueocean

Blueocean Market Intelligence is a global analytics and insights provider that helps corporations realise a 360-degree view of their customers through data integration and a multidisciplinary approach enabling a sound, data-driven business decisions. It is part of the Cross-Tab group that includes more than 1000 professionals serving the world’s largest companies from offices in the United States, United Kingdom, Singapore, Dubai and India.

Employee strength:

1500

Key Analytics Solutions:

They offer solutions in market effectiveness, market intelligence, digital transformation and have  an analytics centre of excellence. Marketing effectiveness is offered through integrated marketing measurement, people based marketing and assuring sale effectiveness. They provide digital analytics consulting while the analytics centre of excellence includes analytics cloud infrastructure, big data engineering, business intelligence and visualisation, advanced data sciences, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Key Differentiators in Analytics Solutions:

The company believes that the key differentiators in their analytics solutions are business ROI, technology enabled accelerators and its products.

Geographies and Clients they serve:

The company serves geographies like America, META, APAC and Europe.

2. Bridgei2i

BRIDGEi2i has been a trusted partner for enabling data-driven business transformation in enterprises by leveraging advanced analytics, domain expertise, and artificial intelligence-powered technology accelerators. It enables businesses to contextualise data, generate actionable insights from complex business problems, and make data-driven decisions across pan-enterprise processes to create sustainable business impact. It strives to generate value to the clients in each stage of their analytics journey from information to insight to impact. Working with many Fortune 500 companies globally, it solves business problems across functions and industries.

Employee strength:

With an employee strength of more than 270, they have major operations in India across Bengaluru, Pune Delhi NCR, while Texas, Washington, California, Massachusetts, and Illinois in the USA.

Key Analytics Solutions:

BRIDGEi2i offers solutions in marketing, sales, supply chain, risk, and customer intelligence. These solutions cater to various industries, including banking and financial services, insurance, technology, retail, and consumer packaged goods. Some of their key analytics platforms are Sales Decision Engine for sales performance, ExTrack which is a customer experience management platform, S-Reco which is a sales recommendation engine and M2 , a model governance and monitoring solution.

Key Differentiators in Analytics Solutions:

Some of its key differentiators are:

• Best-in-class capability – They excel in areas such as data engineering, strategic analysis, personalisation, optimisation, data decision engine, and analytics operationalisation
• Custom business solutions – With deep-rooted domain expertise across industries, BRIDGEi2i’s solutions are customised for specific business functions and problems
• AI Labs – BRIDGEi2i’s AI Labs continuously focuses on developing solutions to solve new business problems
• Technology accelerators – These are pre-built customisable solutions to ensure faster time to market

Geographies and Clients they serve:  

BRIDGEi2i has a large client base primarily in the US, India, and the UK. Their clients include leading Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies in the verticals such as enterprise technology, financial services, insurance, retail, and CPG.

3. Cartesian Consulting

Founded in 2009, in Mumbai, India, Cartesian Consulting is a team of qualified, experienced and talented employees providing services to leading brands globally across sectors including hospitality, travel, retail, food & QSR, e-commerce, telecom, and financial services. They offer solutions in customer analytics, digital analytics, demand forecasting, recommendation engines, NLP and text mining. As the company says, “we are happy taking on questions ranging from “How do I improve a poorly performing channel” to “How do I get more renewals from my customer base” to “Which digital channels help me acquire highest LTV customers”, and a whole lot more.

Employee strength:

170

Key Analytics Solutions:

They work on a range of service offerings spanning customer analytics, marketing analytics, digital analytics including optimisation and testing, business analytics, channel analytics, price, promotions, and margin optimisation. They provide tools and methods including statistics, machine learning and AI methods solutions to a wide range of industries including retail, QSR, hospitality, airlines, financial services, technology, CPG etc.

Key Differentiators in Analytics Solutions:

The company believes that the key differentiator in their analytics solution is their understanding of the business and marketing operations and ability to come up with solutions that specifically drive adoption and incremental gains that are visible and meaningful to business. The breadth of industries, brands and locations that they work with gives them a perspective on many business problems that clients can benefit from.

Geographies and Clients they serve:

They have offices in Mumbai, Bangalore, Gurgaon, Singapore and San Francisco, however, their client base also spreads across APAC and Middle Eastern markets. Some of the major clients include India’s largest retail brands such as grocery, apparel and department stores, large QSR chains in multiple markets, a premium hotel brand, two resort and holiday chains, an airline, three of the top private banks in the country, ecommerce giants and technology giants.

4. Datalicious

Datalicious is a full-service analytics partner and technology firm, providing the tools and insights to help companies achieve more effective marketing outcomes. They began as an analytics consulting partner in Australia and has ever since expanded globally, through their growing product and services divisions. A part of Equifax Group, Datalicious is also one of the largest Google Analytics 360 Suite resellers in south East Asia. Some of their products include the SuperTag tag manager, DataExchange user ID management tool and OptimaHub cross-channel marketing analytics platform.

Employee strength:

Datalicious is a 50-member strong organization with a mix of analysts, data scientists, and client success managers. With head office in Sydney, AU, major delivery and development happens from Bangalore office.

Key Analytics Solutions:

Datalicious is the largest premium reseller of Google Analytics in APAC region. They are the pioneers in web analytics with over 10 years of presence in this space, and have key offerings in customer journey analytics, web and marketing analytics. They recently launched their marketing attribution solution – OtimaHub –  with global partnership with Facebook.

Key Differentiators in Analytics Solutions:

The company goes beyond the standard setup and implementation of web analytics for their clients, and believes that their differentiation lies in with the one-on-one support throughout, with a dedicated team of analytics and data scientists. It is worth mentioning that Datalicious has the largest number of Google Analytics certified professionals in the APAC region, and they also specialise in data science & machine learning in marketing and regularly advise their clients on their overall marketing strategy.

Geographies that the company serve:

Datalicious currently serves all major regions such as APAC, Southeast Asia, India, Europe & North America. They work with the whole spectrum of clients from fortune 500 to early-stage startups.

5. Fractal Analytics

Founded in 2000, Fractal Analytics is a strategic analytics partner to the most admired Fortune 500 companies globally and helps them power every human decision in the enterprise by bringing analytics & AI to the decision-making process. Leading global companies partner with Fractal Analytics to build breakthrough analytics solutions, set up analytical centres of excellence and institutionalise data-driven decisioning.

Key Analytics Solutions:

It offers solutions in data transformation, predictive analytics and visualisation. Some of its products are:

• Concordia, that enables an organization to be analytics ready. It helps in making intelligent and impactful business decisions by harmonizing data from disparate sources using Fractal Analytics’ proven accelerator platform.  
• Customer Genomics by the company is a personalized marketing platform that addresses customer acquisition, valuation management, attrition, loyalty, offer decisions and interaction rules.

• Business 360 Steering Wheel, which is a big data business intelligence service for complex organizations that want to make faster, smarter, and more accurate decisions in real-time.

Key Differentiators in Analytics Solutions:

Fractal serves as strategic partner to their clients where they consult and deliver a wide range of business intelligence analytics custom tailored for centralized analytics teams or individual business units.

Geographies that the company serves:

It has a presence across 12 global locations including the United States, UK and India. They serve clients from offices in San Francisco Bay area, Greater New York area, London, Mumbai, New Delhi, Singapore and Dubai.

6. Hansa Cequity

Today, it’s the age of the customer and Hansa Cequity believes that if firms have to be agile and competitive in the marketplace, they need to enhance Customer Equity better than ever before in their quest to build value, market share and improve customer experience. For over a decade Hansa Cequity has helped businesses acquire customers intelligently, retain them optimally and manage them profitably.

Employee Strength:

500+

Key analytics solutions:

It brings in diverse and rich set of experiences across customer strategy, data management, analytics, digital campaign management and social media strategies to help organisations build a connected engagement platform for their customers. By leveraging the power of technology through proprietary and best-in-class marketing automation and analytics platforms; Cequity’s customer marketing specialists glean out insights that help organisations with their everyday decision making. From simplistic data exploration to building complex analytical models using advanced machine learning/ AI algorithms they help companies identify the right engagement strategies for their customers. They offer services in consulting services (customer strategy, marketing, data management, analytics, digital campaigns management and social media), data management platform, customer analytics and insights platform, marketing optimisation platform, etc.

Key differentiators in analytics solution:

Hansa Cequity’s ability to bring in multidisciplinary teams of specialists who bring together years of experience working in product/services marketing organisations, advertising and direct marketing agencies, analytics companies, technology consultancies, contact centres and digital and creative agencies enables them to stand out in the market by offering unique value propositions for their clientele.

Geographies that the company serves:

With offices in India and the US, it has vast experience in helping India’s leading companies with their customer marketing efforts. Their expertise has been sought out in banking and financial services, consumer & industrial markets, retail, FMCG, travel and hospitality, e-commerce, automotive, DTH and telecom and NGO. 

7. IBM

With a presence in India since 1951, IBM has expanded its operations with regional headquarters in Bangalore and offices across 20 cities. IBM India has established itself as one of the leaders in the Indian Information Technology industry with innovation at the core of the company. It offers end-to-end solutions to clients spanning from software and systems hardware to a broad range of infrastructure, cognitive, cloud and consulting services. With its advanced analytics, research capabilities, comprehensive IT infrastructure knowledge, it helps clients solve complex business and technical issues.

Key Analytics Solutions:

IBM works with clients to provide tools and infrastructure needed to create the perfect information architecture empowering companies to pursue big data projects, such as they have industry’s best data science platform (DSX & SPSS), analytics engine that enables clients to write code and deploy, etc. Their offerings have common analytics architecture and work on public, private and hybrid cloud environment. Clients can buy ready to use analytics solutions from IBM which are built for a specific industry use case e.g., customer insights for telco’s or fraud insights for banks. IBM also provides analytics services which enable clients to outsource analytics projects.

Key Differentiators in Analytics Solutions:

• IBM is world’s highest contributor to apache foundation and its offerings extensively leverage open source technologies to ensure that clients always get the best solution and are able to keep costs low.
• It provides enterprises the ability to work in private, public or hybrid cloud environment. IBM’s use of common analytics engine ensures that code written in one environment would work across all three environments.
• With huge investments in cognitive technologies, IBM has pioneered the cognitive era and has invested billions of dollars in developing Watson, cognitive and analytics technologies.
• IBM has set up a machine learning hub in India to advance the use of ML in India. It is also building a data science elite team to work closely with clients as they deploy advanced analytics projects.
• IBM understands that data is company’s competitive advantage and hence their cognitive offerings are unique to each client making their data secure and accessible only to them.
• IBM has a huge ecosystem in India for analytics services partnering not just with large system integrators, data providers (like twitter, weather company etc.) but also many business partners.

Geographies that the company serve:

It serves almost all global markets globally. Some of its clients in India are banks & telecom companies, amongst others.

8. Manthan

A leading cloud analytics company pioneering analytical applications for consumer-facing businesses, Manthan excels in the application of decision sciences, advanced math and artificial intelligence, to invent and bring ideas to life. Its suite of products has been recognised for enabling the shortest, swiftest and simplest path to profit. An early adopter of advanced technologies in decision sciences, Manthan engineered Maya, the world’s first AI-powered conversational interface for business analytics. With Maya, decision-makers can interact with their data in natural language and perform complex business inquiries through a voice interface. Its products that are powered by AI, cloud and perspective capabilities are unique in their ability to use machine intelligence to process decision contexts and respond automatically with actions and recommendations to manage every aspect of a consumer business.

Headquartered in Bangalore with offices in Santa Clara, London, Dubai, Mexico City, Singapore and Manila, Manthan’s footprint spans 22 countries.

Employee strength:

600+

Key Analytics Solutions:

It offers a comprehensive set of prescriptive analytics solutions for retail and consumer businesses across key business areas such as merchandising, marketing, operations and supply chain. The solutions are powered by an AI platform called ‘Manthan Maya’. It serves as a business advisor focusing on areas that need specific attention by analysing millions of data points and data context. Some of its examples are:

• In merchandising to optimize assortments- It offers category managers recommendations on optimizing assortment mix based on location of stores, sales forecast, weather data, products to be dropped, retained or substituted. It also recommends appropriate price points for slow movers, suggests markdowns and provides expected impact on sales.
• In store operations- Manthan’s solution help Operations teams efficiently run stores by prescribing products to be replenished to prevent out of stock situations by triggering alerts at the right time.
• In marketing- It help marketers recommend the best products and promotional offers based on past purchase, online behaviour, brand preference and channel preferences to drive better engagement and higher conversions.

Key Differentiators in Analytics Solutions:

Some of the USPs for Manthan’s AI solutions include:

• AI driven Recommendations- Manthan’s prescriptive solution analyses millions of decision contexts and data points by leveraging a wide range of machine learning and deep learning algorithms pre-built into the solution. The platform automatically invokes the appropriate algorithmic model based on each use case and suggests actions, guide users to perform necessary actions to improve business outcomes.
• Natural Language Interfaces- Business users can easily access and consume analytics for their daily and strategic tasks through simple voice and text natural language interfaces. It eliminates the need for business users to rely on analyst or IT teams and get answers instantly, on the go. The platform understands intent, context of your query, processes it and responds in real-time.                                                                                                                  
• Data Integration and Management- It can ingest structured and unstructured data from multiple sources and make it available for consumption by Manthan’s AI platform. This helps users get a more holistic view of the business and improve the quality of their decisions manifold.
• Robust Platform- One of the key benefits of the solution is that it is easy to implement and offers high RoI.

Geographies and clients that the company serve:

The company has a global footprint and serves geographies like US, LATAM, India, SEA, MEA and Europe. Manthan serves as the Chief Analytics Officer for over 200 industry leaders like Starbucks, eBay, Landmark Group, Loves, Charming Charlie, Teavana, Crocs, Les Schwab, Comcast, McDonald’s, Ripley, Courts, SM Group and Robinsons.

9. TEG Analytics

TEG Analytics is a data-science-as-a-services company, helping organizations make decisions at the intersection of business, technology, and applied mathematics. TEG focuses on the alignment between the speed of business and speed of insights. Its proprietary FutureWorks, built on open source/ big data platform, provides hassle-free last mile analysis, reduces the time to market and increases the adoption of analytics throughout the client organisation. It has been associated with market leaders across industry verticals like retail, CPG, healthcare, BFSI in shaping strategy powered by analytics.

Employee strength:

The employee strength of the firm falls in the category of 50-200.

Key Analytics Solutions:

TEG offers solutions across retail, CPG, healthcare and BFSI sectors ranging from customer analytics, digital analytics, marketing analytics to database management, data visualization and machine learning. Notable product offerings include HealthWorks, FutureWorks, RetailWorks and DigiWorks.

• Built on big data platform, FutureWorks provides hassle-free hosted analytics solution that caters to the needs of business users. Big data technology allows FutureWorks to provide actionable insights on near real-time data.
• TEG’s HeathWorksTM, a solution powered by Tableau and publicly available healthcare data, helps payors develop an ability to predict in-market performance and reads the entire industry landscape to help them understand the competitiveness of their products. The process involves exhaustive data preparation, a judicious mix of traditional and advanced machine learning techniques and visual analytics.
• RetailWorks, catering to the retail industry, focuses on complete industry landscape instead of client’s data solely as this helps the business users understand the competitiveness of their products. The process involves exhaustive data preparation; from scraping the data, collating them into one master dataset, transforming the variables and obviously the experience of doing it over the years for many clients.
• DigiWorks consists of a suite of analytics models to help companies with strategic, operational and tactical decisions in their digital efforts.

Key Differentiators in Analytics Solutions:

TEG is committed to its vision of delivering Insights @ Speed of Business and provides hassle free analytics for its clients. It not only gives the numbers and model as solution but ties it with business and implement it in the organisational level.

Geographies that the company serve:

TEG serves North America and India. Major clients include Amway, Nike, Clorox, UHG, Fedex, Havas Media.

10. WNS

It is a top-tier analytics and consultative business process management company that enables intelligent processes, insight-driven decision making and smart technology-enablement for more than 300 clients across 11 industries. It has a large analytics practice with more than 2500 data scientists, researchers and domain experts, catering to analytics engagement. It has a wide range of service offerings that cut across industries including customer experience management, marketing analytics, campaign analytics and social media analytics apart from its industry focused analytics solutions driven by domain experts.

Employee strength:

It has over 2,500 employees working in the analytics division.

Key Analytics Solutions:

The company’s analytics services encompass the full suite of analytics offerings driven by big data and machine learning based products to deliver business outcomes to clients. Decision analytics by the company helps in sales and marketing analytics, CRM analytics, domain analytics, and more. Business intelligence and data management includes data management services, exploratory data analysis, MIS and reporting, dashboards and visualisation. It also provides services in analytics/ reporting data mart creation, BI portal development, strategic research and market intelligence, embedded analytics etc.

Key Differentiators in Analytics Solutions:

They use suite of proprietary big data, AI/ML enabled products with which they deliver transformational outcomes while also doubling up as platforms to deliver analytics-as-a-service. WNS is the only company that reports non-FTE revenues to the street and has over 30% of its revenues as non-FTE, which is an industry leading rate. It uses Centre of Excellence model to deliver analytics services to global clients. Its Analytics Innovation Center enables experimentation of new technologies and market trending tools.

Geographies and clients that the company serve:

WNS’ Analytics serves clients across the globe through their Centre of Excellence model. The delivery centers are spread across 52 delivery centers located in China, Costa Rica, India, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Turkey, UK and US. They work with 300+ clients globally out of which 80+ are analytics clients. Some of its clients are global insurance and reinsurance company, global multi line insurer, global hotel chain, airlines, retail majors etc.

Here’s the complete report:

The post 10 Leading Analytics & Data Science Providers in India 2017 – by AIM & AnalytixLabs appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

AI accelerators have been at the forefront in the race of AI. Within the whole acceleration of AI in last few years, 2 key reasons stand out. Firstly, large amount of data that we have stored digitally helps to train neural networks that was not possible a decade ago.

Secondly, neural networks require large processing power to train and traditional processors do not have that level of abilities. Just a simple image recognition of cats through traditional CPU’s might take days or weeks to train.

For AI to go beyond where it is now, the key element is that developers have freedom to train neural nets quickly, make mistakes, learn from those mistakes and polish their algorithms. For that, processing power have to increase. And that’s exactly what most tech giants are after, and not just traditional chip makers.

Here we list down 5 chips (in alphabetic order)especially designed for AI that made headlines this year.

AMD Radeon Instinct

Radeon Instinct is AMD’s brand of deep learning oriented GPUs. It replaced AMD’s FirePro S brand in 2016. Compared to the Radeon brand of mainstream consumer/gamer products, the Radeon Instinct branded products are intended to accelerate deep learning, artificial neural network, and high-performance computing/GPGPU applications.

Apple A11 Bionic Neural Engine

The Apple A11 Bionic is a 64-bit ARM-based system on a chip (SoC), designed by Apple Inc. and manufactured by TSMC. It first appeared in the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X. The A11 includes dedicated neural network hardware that Apple calls a “Neural Engine”. This neural network hardware can perform up to 600 billion operations per second and is used for Face ID, Animoji and other machine learning tasks. The neural engine allows Apple to implement neural network and machine learning in a more energy-efficient manner than using either the main CPU or the GPU.

Google Tensor Processing Unit

A tensor processing unit (TPU) is an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) developed by Google specifically for machine learning. Compared to a graphics processing unit, it is designed for a high volume of low precision computation (e.g. as little as 8-bit precision) with higher IOPS per watt, and lacks hardware for rasterisation/texture mapping. The chip has been specifically designed for Google’s TensorFlow framework. However, Google still uses CPUs and GPUs for other types of machine learning. Other AI accelerator designs are appearing from other vendors also and are aimed at embedded and robotics markets.

Huawei Kirin 970

Kirin 970 is powered by an 8-core CPU and a new generation 12-core GPU. Built using a 10nm advanced process, the chipset packs 5.5 billion transistors into an area of only one cm². HUAWEI’s flagship Kirin 970 is HUAWEI’s first mobile AI computing platform featuring a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU). Compared to a quad-core Cortex-A73 CPU cluster, the Kirin 970’s heterogeneous computing architecture delivers up to 25x the performance with 50x greater efficiency.

IBM Power9

Recently launched by IBM, Power9 is a chip which has a new systems architecture that is optimized for accelerators used in machine learning. Intel makes Xeon CPUs and Nervana accelerators and NVIDIA makes Tesla accelerators. IBM’s Power9 is literally the Swiss Army knife of ML acceleration as it supports an astronomical amount of IO and bandwidth, 10X of anything that’s out there today

Intel Nervana

The Nervana ‘Neural Network Processor’ uses a parallel, clustered computing approach and is built pretty much like a normal GPU. It has 32 GB of HBM2 memory dedicated in 4 different 8 GB HBM2 stacks, all of which is connected to 12 processing clusters which contain further cores (the exact count is unknown at this point). Total memory access speeds combine to a whopping 8 terabits per second.

Nvidia Tesla V100

NVIDIA® Tesla® V100 is the world’s most advanced data center GPU ever built to accelerate AI, HPC, and graphics. Powered by NVIDIA Volta, the latest GPU architecture, Tesla V100 offers the performance of 100 CPUs in a single GPU—enabling data scientists, researchers, and engineers to tackle challenges that were once impossible.

The post Top 7 Microprocessor Chips Specifically Designed To Accelerate Artificial Intelligence appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

As the year 2017 comes to an end, here we list all the interesting and no-to-missed developments in the space of AI and analytics in India. While analytics has been making a head way in Indian industries over the past few years, what is interesting note is that over a span of one year, the industry has witnessed immense adoption of what many term the wave of fourth industrial revolution—artificial intelligence. From startups emerging in the space of AI to companies adopting robust technologies like chatbot, the year 2017 saw many interesting developments in the space. The industry also witnessed funding and investment, acquisitions, appointments, launch of analytics center and much more. Here’s a flashback of the biggest developments in the year 2017.

Funding and Investment

March:

PipeCandy receives a seed round funding: Data science startup received $1.1 million in a recent seed funding round organized by IDG Ventures India, Axilor Ventures, Silicon Valley based Emergent Ventures, Indian Angel Network, and other individual founders.

April:

Impress.ai gets invested by ‘Javelin Startup-O Victory Fund’: An automated platform for screening and assessing candidates with an AI powered chat interference, it has received an undisclosed amount of funding from the Javelin Startup-O Victory Fund, which is managed out of Singapore.

Squad bags $2.1m in a recent funding round: Squad, a Delhi-based work automation startup recently snapped up a sum of $2.1 million as part of a funding round. Blume Ventures, Contrarian Capital, and Axilor Ventures, among others took part in the funding round.

Paytm invests in startup QorQl: Paytm has invested an undisclosed amount on the Noida-based online healthcare startup QorQl, that uses AI and big data extensively.

Bangalore startup DataWeave raises an undisclosed Funding: Japan-based ad-tech company FreakOut Group led a funding round, where business intelligence startup DataWeave raised an undisclosed amount as a part of the Series A funding round.

Absentia gets INR 8 crore from Exfinity Venture and others: Bangalore-headquartered AI startup Absentia has bagged INR 8 crores in a pre-series A round of funding from Exfinity Venture Partners, former Infosys executives V Balakrishnan and Mohandas Pai, Deepak Ghaisas and Girish Paranjpe

Innefu Labs secures $2 million Fund: Delhi-based AI startup Innefu Labs raised USD 2 million in funding from IndiaNivesh Venture Capital Fund. The series A funding will see the investors picking up a minority stake in the company.

May:

Vidooly raises 1.4 million in funding: Noida-based video analytics startup Vidooly  raised INR 8.9 crore series A funding from GVFL and Times Internet. The startup will plow this funding for product engineering, marketing, and augmenting the sales and distribution channels.

Breast cancer screening startup receives seed funding: Niramai, a Bangalore-based startup, announced a seed funding round led by Pi Ventures. The round additionally witnessed participation from Axilor Ventures, 500 Startups, Ankur Capital, and Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal

Flytxt raises Rs 70 crore: Netherlands-based Flytxt customer data analytics Software Company announced that it has aised Rs.70 crore funding from DAH Beteiligungs GmbH. Flytxt plans to invest new funds in R&D.

World Bank’s IFC invests in pi Ventures’ maiden fund: International Finance Corporation (IFC), a part of the World Bank Group, has invested US $3mn in pi Ventures’ maiden fund, India’s first Applied Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Internet of Things (IoT) focused early stage venture fund.

June:

Julia Computing secures 4.6M in seed funding: Julia computing bagged $4.6M in Seed Funding from General Catalyst and Founder Collective investors. Julia was born out of the open source community. The language has a huge developer base and is known for its speed, capacity and productivity.

Unbxd raises $12.5 million funding: Product discovery and analytics service provider Unbxd raised 12.5 million dollars in Series C funding led by Eight Roads Ventures, the proprietary investment arm of Fidelity International Limited, and from existing investors including IDG Ventures, Inventus Capital Partners and Nirvana Ventures.

AI startup Boxx.ai raises $500K: Unicorn India Ventures invested in Bangalore-based artificial intelligence startup Boxx.ai. The startup founded by Ajay Kashyap,  Prakhar Raj and Shitiz Bansal uses artificial intelligence to democratize analytics and recently launched their product AIDA. The startup has raised $500K funding led by Unicorn India Ventures.

Niki.ai receives a $2M Series A funding: The firm received a major $2 million Series A funding from San Francisco-based SAP.iO, and existing investor Unilazer Ventures.

Quantta Analytics raises an undisclosed amount of funding: Data analytics startup Quantta Analytics secured an undisclosed amount of funding in the Pre-Series A round. The funding was aimed to be used to strengthen the core technology team and set up a centre in San Francisco.

FORMCEPT secured an undisclosed Series A funding: The firm raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from GVFL Limited. FORMCEPT is a unified data analysis platform that helps enterprises get actionable insights from their data faster.

July:

Bottr.me gets funded by 500 Startups and others: 500 startups (an early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator), Purvi Capital, Rajan Anandan (Vice President, Southeast Asia and India, Google) and Abhishek Gupta from TLabs invested an undisclosed amount on Bottr, that allows the users to create an AI based virtual avatar.

Mobikon Secures $7 Million Funding: Mobikon, a noted customer engagement and analytics platform for hospitality industry raised $7 million in its third round of institutional funding. The three lead investors are Sistema Asia Fund, C31 Ventures and Qualgro.

August:

Credit Suisse’s NEXT Investors Backs Pune-Based Sapience Analytics: Pune-based Sapience Analytics, an innovative People Analytics solution company, received a majority investment from Credit Suisse Asset Management’s NEXT Investors.

September:

AI Driven Healthcare Startup Mfine Secures Seed Funding: India’s first artificial intelligence-driven healthcare network, has raised Rs 9.5 crore ($1.5 million) in its seed funding round from Stellaris Venture Partners. The funding will be used by the Bengaluru-based startup for product development.

CreditVidya Raises $5M In Series-B Funding: Mumbai-based InfoCredit Services Pvt. Ltd, which operates credit scoring platform CreditVidya, raised $5 million (Rs 32 crore) by Matrix Partners.

October:

Multipoint Capital Invests $2 Million ParellelDots: ParallelDots, a Gurugram-based AI and deep learning startup secured a funding of $2 million from US-based investment firm Multipoint Capital.

ThirdWatch Raises Angel Funding: Artificial Intelligence-powered fraud prevention startup ThirdWatch raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding from Indian Angel Network.

Ola Raises $1.1B In Funding: It has raised $1.1 billion from China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd and existing investor SoftBank Group Corp. of Japan. Ola plans to make strategic investments in its supply chain and technology, while also making significant investments in technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning

November:

Qubole Raises $25 Million: The company raised $25 million in strategic round of funding led by Singtel Innov8 and Harmony Partners with participation from existing investors Charles River Ventures (CRV), Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Institutional Venture Partners (IVP).

Big Data Startup Crayon gets funded: Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan has invested an undisclosed amount in the Singapore and Chennai-based Big Data company Crayon Data. The investment was a part of Crayon Data’s Series A2 round of funding.

EdGE Networks Gets Funded By Kalaari Capital and Ventureast: It secured a $4.5 million in Series A funding led by Kalaari Capital with Ventureast as co-investor. The company intends to use the capital to build upon its early success in the HR technology space

WiFi Analytics Startup i2e1 Raises $3 Million: Delhi-based WiFi analytics startup i2e1 has raised $3 million in Series A funding led by impact investment firm Omidyar Network. Some of organisation’s existing investors, Auxano Ventures and 3one4 Capital (a company backed by Mohandas Pai), participated in the round.

Active.Ai raises $8.25 million: Active.ai, a Singapore based fintech startup with an innovation lab in Bengaluru, has raised $8.25 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Vertex Ventures, Creditease Holdings and Dream Incubator.

AI Crowdsourcing Platform Playment Raises $1.6 Million: Bengaluru-based AI-driven mobile crowdsourcing platform Playment raised $1.6 million as part of its Pre-Series A funding from Y-Combinator, Sparkland Capital, and angels such as Ryan Petersen, Max Altman, David Petersen and others.

December:

Cisco’s John Chambers buys 10% stake in Uniphore: 10 percent of Chennai-based speech analytics firm Uniphore Software Systems’ shares have been picked up by the US India Business Council (USIBC). Uniphore’s speech analytics product “auMina” and virtual assistant product “akeira” are attracting attention and winning customers in all across the globe.

Management Appointments

March:

Fractal Analytics hires Sameer Dhanrajani as Chief Strategy Officer: The 2000 founded company hired Dhanrajani to drive strategic investments and lead the charge of high-priority growth initiatives and enable clients on AI-led transformation of their businesses.

FM plans to hire professionals to support development of big data architecture: In an attempt to push the development of big data  architecture within the country, Indian Finance Ministry announced hiring 120 IT professionals.

July:

John Irudayaraj appointed as Managing Partner of Rinalytics Advisors: A talent search firm focused on Analytics and Data Science, Rinalytics announced the appointment of Mr. John Irudayaraj as the Managing Partner, where he would be spearheading Rinalytics Advisors.

October:

Deep Thomas joins Aditya Birla Group: Aditya Birla Group hired Deep Thomas, a former Tata Group executive, as its chief data and analytics officer, where he would be responsible to create a group-wide customer database supporting the diversified conglomerate products and sales strategy.

Deepinder Dhingra moves to Noodle.ai: Former Mu Sigma Executive, Dhingra was appointed as the chief product officer of Noodle.ai, where he would lead a world-class team of data scientists, data engineers, software engineers, supercomputing technologists, and product managers to extend Noodle.ai’s position as the leader in Enterprise Artificial Intelligence applications.

Nitin Seth Joins Data Analytics Firm Incedo as CEO: He was appointed with an aim of building on Incedo’s strong list of clients, deepen its commitment to drive innovation in emerging technologies and lead Incedo in its next phase of growth.

Acquisition

January:

Arvato acquires Ramyam: Arvato CRM solutions acquired India-based IT and analytics company Ramyam Intelligence Lab Pvt. Ltd in a multi-million Euros deal

March:

Verisk Analytics acquires Fintellix: With a plan to expand its expertise in the data solutions arena, Verisk laid out its plans of acquiring India-based Fintellix.

June:

Happiest Minds acquires U.S. based OSSCube: Bangalore based Happiest Minds announced the acquisition of OSSCube, a U.S. based digital transformation company, with an aim to expand the company’s portfolio of transformative offerings in the consulting-led digital space.

Fractal Analytics completes acquisition of 4i Inc.: The prior completed acquisition of 4i Inc., a Chicago-based firm, to improve analytics and AI and expand its growth strategy consulting capabilities

July:

Google acquires Halli Labs: Google acquired the Bangalore based AI startup Halli Labs for an undisclosed amount. This former Stayzilla CTO led company was founded with a deep belief around artificial intelligence, machine learning and NLP.

Emids acquires Encore Health: emids, a healthcare IT leader and data & analytics solution provider announced the acquisition of Encore Health Resources, to have an increased ability to serve the needs of providers, and offer more holistic solutions to payers and technology partners.

August:

Freshworks acquires web analytics startup Zarget: Seven-year old enterprise software firm Freshworks on Monday acquired Zarget, a startup that specialises in Software as a Service (SaaS). The deal, valued at around $15-18 million, marks the entry of Freshworks into the automation marketing business, and a step towards becoming a multi product company.

September:

HCL Tech acquires ETL Factory: ETL Factory, which operates as Datawave, was bought by HCL Technology for approximately over Rs. 58 crore. The amount included contingent payments subject to certain financial milestones.

November:

Crisil announces acquisition of Pragmatix: Crisil, one of India’s noted providers of ratings, data, research, analytics and solutions signed a definitive agreement to acquire Pragmatix Services Private Limited for ₹56 crore.

Phonon Communications acquires iDelivr: Phonon, a company in the field of automated customer interaction solutions announced the acquisition of artificial intelligence chatbot company iDelivr, a Gurgaon based startup.

Collaboration and Partnership

January:

Agreement signed with Innefu to prevent warfare: The startup will utilize AI to analyze data fed by Indian intelligence agencies to identify patterns from the past and predict future outcomes and save the country from Cyber warfare.

March:

Hotstar and Zapr tie-up: Hotstar, one of the leading digital streaming platforms in India partneres with Zapr Media Lab to create a better understanding of the mobile audience that can further be used by brands for personalized communication.

YES Bank enters into a deal with Payjo: The latter will provide the financial institution with the first AI-driven bot for a wallet. This step will complement the firm’s already trusted and popular YES Pay wallet service with over half-a-million users.

April:

Aureus Analytics inks multi-year analytics deal with Landmark Insurance Broker: As part of the deal, Aureus Analytics will help Landmark Insurance Broker improve their end customer experience by leveraging data analytics and machine learning.

July:

India & Israel collaborate on AI: The historic visit of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Israel got the two countries talking over various important issues—artificial intelligence being one of it.

September:

Flipkart and Microsoft collaborate: E-commerce giant Flipkart is working with Microsoft to start using artificial intelligence and machine learning-based solutions to make future sales.

November:

Ola Partners With Microsoft: Ola joined hands with tech giant Microsoft to build a connected vehicle platform. This partnership would help Ola access their cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence and productivity tools to improve passenger experience and enable predictive maintenance of vehicles.

Airtel partners with Amdocs: the partnership is aimed at introducing AI based services to its customer.

Analytics adoption and launches

January:

Boeing unveils analytics focused center in Bengaluru: Boeing, the world’s biggest aerospace company unveiled its engineering & technology centre in Bengaluru, with the aim to make the most of material sciences, flight sciences and data analytics.

February:

RBI’s adopts blockchain technology: In a first, RBI’s research arm, Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT) completed the first ever end-to-end test of the technology behind Bitcoin, boosting its application in banking and financial sectors.

Aureus Analytics launches CRUX: A first of its kind comprehensive Data Analytics platform, CRUX has been designed specifically for insurers to deliver better customer experience. With CRUX, business and analytics users can capture data from multiple sources, both internal and external to the insurer, to create a single source of truth.

Amazon Web Services adds AI to cloud: AWS India added more teeth with an AI-first approach by adding services such as image analysis, visual search, speech recognition among others on its infrastructure for developers and enterprises to build products.

April:

GroupM’s Essence sets up global analytics hub in India: Essence that represents GroupM’s global digital agency indicated its plan to focus on campaign analytics for global clients with the announcement of the launch of Global Analytics Hub in New Delhi. It will also work in mobile analytics, machine learning, social data mining, and customer analytics.

Hortonworks debuts new office in Bangalore: Hortonworks headquartered in Santa Clara unveiled their expanded office in Bangalore. The new premise is keeping in line with the company’s goal to plow more investment in international markets in 2017 and drive more usage of its Connected Data Platforms and new solutions.

May:

Paytm unveils Payments Bank with data science at the core: Paytm Payments Bank kick-started a new kind of banking model. To spruce up for the smooth rollout of Paytm Payments bank, the mobile wallet company appointed Amit Singhal, a Google veteran and former head of Google Search.

June:

Infosys’ changes Mana to “Nia”: In a wake of protest by the German software behemoth SAP, Infosys pulled out the name of it ambitious AI platform Mana to Nia. It sounded very similar to SAP’s in memory database platform—Hana.

NEC Corporation set a foot in India’s big data and analytics market: Japan-based NEC Corporation made a move to strengthen its foothold in India’s big data analytics market. It made an announcement of investing 10 million to set up an analytics centre in Noida.

July:

WISeKey launches AI and Blockchain CoE in India: The company announced the launch of an Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain Centre of Excellence in India to support its global projects and appointmented Bikramaditya Singhal as head of the AI and Blockchain practice in India.

August:

IIT Madras signs MoU with Robert Bosch: Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions (RBEI) signed an MoU with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT M) to set up the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBC-DSAI).

Qlik Expands its ‘Academic Program’ in India: Data analytics company Qlik announced the expansion of the Qlik academic program to cover 50 education institutions across 25 cities in India.

IBM Opens its first machine learning hub in Bengaluru: Software giant IBM opened up its first machine learning hub in India. The hub, located in Bengaluru, is a physical space for organisations to visit for hands-on training on ML.

PayPal’s launches AI and ML innovation labs: PayPal, a global leader in offering digital payment platforms recently announced the launch of Technology Innovation Labs in India. Based out of the PayPal’s tech centers in Bangalore and Chennai, it would focus primarily on productivity, innovation, and education around the currently trending technologies.

Amazon Echo announced official launch in India: Amazon reportedly made its mind to launch Alexa-enabled smart speaker Echo and its smaller version Echo Dot, to boost up home automation space in the country.

Host Analytics expands R&D resence in India: Host Analytics announced that it plans to expand its R&D bases in India at Hyderabad. They would also be investing $25 million in the R&D Center and scale up its engineering workforce over the next three years.

September:

Google Bets big on AI and ML with Cloud India Region: Technology giant Google announced setting up its first cloud region (data centre) in Mumbai within this year. With the Google Cloud India Region going live, enterprises in India will soon be able to take advantage of the high speeds, low latency and performance benefits uniquely offered by Google Cloud Platform services.

India’s first multi-faceted AI and robotics center to be launched: India’s first multi-faceted artificial intelligence and robotics centre will be set up in Bengaluru which will be set up at the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) campus in Bengaluru and the state government had earmarked an initial grant of Rs 5 crore for the purpose.

October:

Indian cops plan on using big data to prevent crimes: The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) is trying to use crime data analytics software to enable predictive policing so that crime can be stopped even before it takes place.

November:

Hitachi Introduces data-driven solutions firm Vantara: Japanese tech major Hitachi Ltd on introduced Hitachi Vantara in India which is set to deliver data-driven solutions for commercial and industrial enterprises. It will help enterprises by bringing new data-driven solutions and services to the market.

December:

US-Based Planet Labs Inc. sets up development centre in India: A US-based integrated aerospace and Data Analytics company Planet Labs Inc is set to open a development centre in India. One of their key motivators was to tap into the technical expertise as well as explore the business opportunities.

Flipkart introduces new internal AI Unit: In a move to strengthen its efforts towards furthering its interest in the field of Artificial Intelligence, Flipkart has created a new internal unit devoted to AI. The unit called AIforIndia, will be headed by Chief Data Scientist Mayur Datar.

Alibaba cloud comes to India: Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is set to enter the Indian market with its cloud-computing arm, Alibaba Cloud. The group’s entry in Asia’s second-largest country will accelerate the growth this sector.

Mumbai University sets up Institute for AI: Mumbai University’s Vidyanagari campus is set to get a brand new research and educational institute for Artificial Intelligence. The first-of-its-kind centre aims at finding solutions to social challenges by using modern techniques such as artificial intelligence and data science, among others.

AI, Machine Learning, Chatbot and other tech

February:

Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas adopts AI, becomes first: In India, a leading full service law firm, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas showed interest in adopting artificial intelligence to help the firm enhance its delivery model.

March:

HDFC launches of its AI-powered chatbot EVA: The bank launched an electronic virtual assistant (EVA) that uses artificial intelligence driven techniques to address customer issues.

Microsoft unveils desi chatbot Ruuh for India: The English speaking Microsoft chatbot is created for entertainment purpose only and is available to users in India. Seemingly aimed for the younger, mobile using demographic in India, the chatbot is available on Facebook messenger.

April:

Google brings Neural Machine Translation to nine Indian languages: The search giant brought Neural Machine Translation between English and nine widely used Indian languages — Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam and Kannada.

Accenture-led AI solutions drive Akshaya Patra’s Million Meals program: Accenture and famed NGO mid-day meal provider Akshaya Patra has teamed up to deploy disruptive technologies to significantly increase the number of mid-day meals served to children across schools in India using tech like AI, IoT, blockchain.

Tata Capital unveils AI based Chatbot: Tata Capital, the financial arm of Tata Group unveiled its Artificial Intelligence based chatbot which relies on natural language and cognitive learning capabilities to understand the queries and respond individually to each of these.

May:

Modi expects AI to dominate human life in future: Prime Minister Modi spoke about his opinion surrounding AI landscape during the launch of an integrated case management system for the Supreme Court, in New Delhi.

Candidates to take AI and big data questions in CFA exams from 2019: As of 2019, the exam would see new topics such as algorithmic and high-frequency trading along with the usual ones.

Karbonn launches new smartphone with an AI-based fashion app: The latest smartphones, called Karbonn Aura Note 2 integrates an artificial intelligence based solution. It comes with an app ‘Vistoso‘ that allows users to search for an outfit by simply clicking its picture. The AI engine of the app automatically recognizes the print, pattern and color of the outfit to give relevant results.

Google’s AI program for diabetic retinopathy in Indian: Google researchers had worked closely with doctors in India and the US to create a development dataset of 128,000 images which were each evaluated by 3-7 ophthalmologists from a panel of 54 ophthalmologists. This dataset was used to train a deep neural network to detect referable diabetic retinopathy.

July:

Ratan Tata expresses his fear for AI: The Chairman of Tata Group warned that AI technologies like robot can replace human intervention and hurt jobs in the coming future.

Infosys dabbles into Self Driving space: The company unveiled driverless, autonomous golf cart, built by the company’s Mysore based engineers.

August:

Vidooly’s ‘Brand Safety Tool’ keeps a check on prohibited content: The tool created by the in-house technology team at Vidooly, uses a combination of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Big data to examine every pixel of content because an advertise places their ads in the content.

Tamil Film ‘Mersal’ connects to its fans via AI-based Chatbot: Mersal partnered with ICONICbot, an Indo-Austrian company and launched Artificial Intelligence-based TSL ChatBot on Facebook Messenger to chat with fans.

Odisha teenager develops humanoid: This boy from Odisha’s Balasore district claimed to have successfully developed a humanoid robot, that, with its artificial intelligence algorithms can guard the border.

September:

Rahul Gandhi visits Silicon Valley to learn about AI:  There were reports of Gandhi looking to “expand his thoughts about artificial intelligence” and implement it at the policy level in the Congress party’s vision documents.

SBI Introduces Chatbot SIA: India’s largest public sector lender State Bank of India, has introduced its own artificial intelligence powered chatbot, Sia which is currently undergoing beta testing. It is programmed to take care of customer queries and give out information on SBI’s wide range of products and services.

HDFC Bank’s ‘Eva’ becomes India’s largest, smartest chatbot: HDFC Bank’s artificial intelligence-based chatbot ‘Eva’ achieved the title of India’s largest chatbot, by successfully addressing over 2.7 million customer queries in just six months.

October:

Capillary Launches ‘VisitorMetrix’, AI-based visitor counter: It would maintain a visitor count and analyse customer behaviour in the shop floor. This could help in drastically improving the store efficiencies, conversions and campaign effectiveness.

IIT Madras develops algorithms that can ‘Learn Like Humans’: The researchers construct their own algorithms for complex tasks. The team trained the algorithm using “experts” that were basically programs that had mastered a method of playing the game AlphaGo.

24[7] Rechristened To [24]7.ai:  To better reflect its leadership in leveraging artificial intelligence to dramatically improve customer experience, [24]7, changed its name to [24]7.ai.

December:

Indian Stock Exchanges desires to venture into AI, data analysis: They sought SEBI’s permission to engage in activities or businesses that are unrelated to, or not identical to, those of a stock exchange or of clearing corporations or their core business, through a separate legal entity.

Robot Mitra Greets VIPs On The Stage: Mitra, an indigenous robot developed by Bengaluru-based start-up, walked up to welcome Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Ivanka Trump at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) opening in Hyderabad on Tuesday.

Chennai Restaurant becomes India’s first to hire robots as waiters: A restaurant in Chennai has given India its very first robot-themed restaurant. The restaurant named  ‘Robot’, which was formerly known as MOMO, is founded by Venkatesh Rajendran and Karthik Kannan.

Startup Accelerator Program

January:

Oracle and Airbus Bizlab pick Indian startups as part of accelerator program: Startups like Niyo Solutions, ExpertRec were selected as a part of the program. Besides being a part of Oracle Network, the startups were facilitated with Oracle’s pool of partners, customers, investor community and no-cost access to Oracle cloud services.

October:

Oracle Picks AI, IoT Based startups: The program for which the applications were invited in May 2017, selected a mix of companies using AI, predictive analytics, IoT, machine learning, chatbot and VR.

Government Initiatives

January:

Karnataka Education Department puts school on GIS map: To overcome the problem of unplanned distribution of schools across the state, Karnataka Education Department joined forces with Karnataka Government to put 76000 schools on GIS map.

Indian Railways embrace data analytics: With an aim to monetize the available data, Suresh Prabhu-led Indian Railways had stepped into the game of digitization and using data-centric approaches to benefit the railways.

June:

Government plans to have analytics tool to furnish airline price trends: Having analytics tools at place would provide travelers with future ticket price trends which would help in addressing the lingering concerns that travelers face because of steep fluctuation in airfares.

August:

Commerce Ministry sets up task force dedicated to AI: Nirmala Sitharaman lead ministry of Commerce and Industry constituted a task force to prepare for the industrial revolution 4.0 and the resulting economic transformation.

Kendriya Vidyalaya Sanghatan to use data capture & analytics: Close on the heels of the Central Government’s programmes such as ‘Make In India’ and ‘Start Up India’, the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sanghatan embraces “smart” technology to ensure all round development of children across the nation

September:

India forms policy group to study AI: NASSCOM announced that India has formed a policy group to study the new technologies and also recommend a framework for its adoption.

November:

Karnataka plans to launch CoE for AI and Data Science: The state announced investment of Rs. 40 crore to have India’s very own Silicon Valley within it with companies in AI and data science.

Government of Rajasthan implements big data environment: The Government of Rajasthan is announced working on providing a Big Data and Analytics environment to analyze state level data in order to enhance citizen services and engagement

December:

Government takes initiative to counter AI revolution in public sector: The National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog), a policy think tank of the Indian Government, recently proposed that the country should be ready to tackle the side-effects of automation, particularly unemployment.

Others

July:

Coca Cola ceases analytics operations at Pune: As a part of restructuring, Coca Cola announced ceasing down its biggest analytics and technical innovation centers in India by December 2017.

Dhiraj Rajaram becomes largest stake-holder at MuSigma: MuSigma Chairman bought out a major chunk of shares owned by his former wife Ambiga Subramanian, putting to rest the rumors about company’s leadership.

September:

Modi asks tax officials to use data analytics to track undeclared wealth: It was believed that by scrutinizing data in this manner, it is would be easy for the government to find out tax evaders.

TomTom’s opened Centre Of Excellence at Pune: The company which inaugurated it latest Traffic Centre at its Centre of Excellence in Pune, aims at helping people make smarter decisions.

India and China held discussion for AI development: Leading Indian software firms such as HCL, Infosys, Wipro and Cognizant among others held discussions with Chinese hardware firms in China’s port city of Dalian for cooperation in the field of artificial intelligence.

November:

Ambiga Subramanian launches New Social Networking App: Ex MuSigma CEO, co-founded hyphen.social, new a social-networking application with a primary focus on increasing social engagement within the social network.

The post Flashback 2017: All The News Stories About Analytics And AI That Made Headlines In India appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

The year 2017 has come to an end, and if I were to go by my timeline on social media, many of my friends and colleagues are heaving a collective sigh of relief.

For us in the field of analytics, this year has been a roller-coaster ride. Analytics is on its way to making itself an integral part of any organisations ecosystem, and automation and artificial intelligence is making a headway in large-scale industries.

From Google acquiring a small four-month old startup — its first in India — to young companies venturing into making smarter chatbots, the year 2017 has been quite fruitful. Who can forget drones delivering Amazon packages, or AI being used to do a variety of things ranging from artwork, literature, fiction writing, music, poems, as well as cooking.

Then of course, there was Sophia.

This charming AI-powered robot became the first humanoid to be granted citizenship in any country. UAE, which welcomed her with open arms showcased itself to be much readier and accepting of newer technologies.

But one of the key things that stands out this year is the open debate between famous personalities on the use of Artificial Intelligence. Yes, the debate has been going on since a very long time, but this year, many of the tech giants — from Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk spoke of misgivings and a darker future if AI was not kept in check. India’s NR Narayana Murthy also called it a “hype” and spoke about how the freshers were losing out on big salaries because of it.

Despite all this, what warms the hearts of Analytics India Magazine team members, is the open discourse and dialogue that has been opened this year regarding these concepts which were considered too “high brow” or “technical” once upon a time.

Now, onto our most popular stories from 2017.

Top 5 most popular Research Stories

10 Leading Masters Programs on Artificial Intelligence from around the world

AI education is still in its early days. Sifting through some of the programs on Artificial Intelligence from around the world, we found that not many educational organizations are offering AI courses yet. Most universities that are offering AI courses are doing so as a specialty of elective within larger computer science masters programs.

Yet some universities, mostly in europe, have a headstart in this area and are providing dedicated masters programs in AI.

Top 10 Data Scientists in India – 2017

For this year’s ranking, data scientists from various organisations and those working independently, were considered, irrespective of size and nature of work. Like last year, we also got in touch with data scientists that we know personally who might not necessarily be associated with an organisation.

The top 10 names were concluded based on various parameters like pedigree, patents, papers and technical publications authored, competitions participated, pioneering work, knowledge and applicability of tools, ability to convince multiple stakeholders through data insights and many more.

10 Emerging Analytics Startups in India to watch for in 2017

After an extensive research and brainstorming, we bring to you the names of 10 such emerging analytics startups that hold a promising future. And just like last year, the task wasn’t easy, as every startup has a competitive edge to offer over others. Read below to find out 10 emerging analytics startups in India to watch for in 2017.

10 Robotics Startups in India that are pushing the boundaries of this area

Today, robotics finds usage beyond manufacturing and more towards areas like ecommerce, logistics, retail, healthcare etc. Robotics also has significant overlap with Artificial Intelligence. Here we list down 10 new age robotics startups in India (in alphabetic order) that are broadening the horizon of what robots are all about.

10 Startups in India that are leading the race of Artificial Intelligence – 2017

With a lot of development in AI happening around the globe, India is coming up with equally unique perspectives on the field, as their other developed counterparts. Apparently, in India alone the number of start-ups booming in the space touches 200+, with investments flowing from all major investors.

AIM lists down 10 such emerging startups in the space that are leading the race. From HR, education and other analytics driven industries, these AI startups are making a headway in all the major sectors.

Our education segment caters to in-depth program reviews, like the one we did for Great Lakes on launching 1 year PGP in Big Data Analytics, UpX Academy’s Industry-Backed Big Data and Data Science courses or how Upgrad is preparing professionals for Analytics World. These reviews are found extremely insightful by analytics and data science aspirants who are looking for right institutes to learn analytics.

Other top reviews include PGP in Business Analytics at Praxis Business School & The 10 most promising Data Science Masters programs in US.

Our events section was highlighted by Cypher 2017. We successfully concluded the 3^rd edition of this mega analytics summit.

Within Cypher, the Second Edition Of Great Learning Data Science Awards Concludes By Recognizing The Best Players In Analytics Industry. Here’s why you should attend Cypher.

Our learning corner gets the best technical stories around data science and AI. The emphasis is to help developers and aspirants to know more about this field. 5 most popular stories in this section are:

10 standard puzzles asked during Analytics Interviews

10 Machine Learning Algorithms every Data Scientist should know

10 Hadoop Alternatives that you should consider for Big Data

How to become a data scientist in 2017

Top Skills and Tools to master to become a data analyst

This is the section where we speak about the latest ideas, insightful listicles and opinions about the industry. Most of our contributed articles from guest authors also go here. 5 most popular stories in this section are:

10 most popular Machine Learning Projects on Github

10 most impressive Research Papers around Artificial Intelligence

10 Documentaries On Artificial Intelligence That Are A Must Watch

Scoring with analytics: Top sports analytics companies in India

How different is Cognitive Computing from Artificial Intelligence?

Where we showcase key people behind the industry and how they are changing the landscape and doing awesome work.

5 most popular stories in this section are:

Meet the Analytics & Data Science Head at Kabbage, one of the hottest fintech companies

Platforms Like Kaggle Have Changed The Hiring Landscape, Says Rohan Rao, A Kaggle Grandmaster

Exploring the latest in analytics industry with one of the pioneers in this space

“Analytics has helped us increase the customer base drastically”- Subramanian M S, Head of Analytics, bigbasket

A Compilation of 20 Insightful Quotes from Indian Analytics Leaders

The section where we showcase startups making a mark in analytics & AI.

Meet this startup, working extensively to make Data and AI central to Indian healthcare industry

Story of CaseMine, NCR based startup that’s disrupting Indian legal system using AI

This Bangalore Based Analytics Startup Wants To Be The Leader In Marketing Mix Modeling

Check Out How This Young Startup Is Helping Ecommerce Companies in India Use Visual Search

Boxx.ai startup wants to lead the wave in democratizing analytics

Best wishes for the new year from the whole AIM team!

The post The AIM Year in Review: Our Most Popular stories from 2017 appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Individuals are unaware of the importance of sleep breathing, that it can be tracked, and that it can be treated to improve health.

Difficulties in conveying breathing health data contribute to the resistance encountered by individuals in being screened/diagnosed/treated for sleep apnea.

Problem Statements

Problem1. Develop a package/app that Identifies Sound Signatures of a Breath from Sound Signatures of Natural Language.

• Background: Breathing can be considered a form of non-voiced speech. However it is not clear if breaths (signal) can be isolated from voiced speech (noise) in an audio file.
• Materials: Anonymized sound files of peoples’ breathing in sleep encoding breaths, speech and other noise.
• Deliverable: Solution document and Code file

Problem2. Develop an Engaging Interface for laypeople to Track Sleep Breathing Health

• Background: Sleep breathing health is a new concept to many people, and it is important to clearly communicate their breathing patterns, sleep patterns and periods of normal and abnormal breathing.
• Materials: Summary data of breathing sounds during sleep, that summarize periods of normal breathing, disturbed breathing and sleep quality.
• Deliverable: Solution document and Code file

It is possible to combine problems 1 and 2, i.e. to analyze breathing sounds and then develop new informatics approaches to link data or display results.

Examples

Hackers can consider these ideas, but are not limited to these:

• Develop a gaming approach to motivate an individual to track their sleep
• Design 3D interactive graphs or movies to communicate to a lay person their sleep health, general health, movement, sleep awakenings and duration of sleep
• Design a multimodal visual/audio/haptic interface
• Use a crowdsourcing approach to assess health metrics against others

Evaluation Criteria

 Our purpose is to select not only a project, but also a promising team:

• Alignment with Thalesat’s mission
• Potential Impact of solution on Thalesat’s operational goals
• Maturity of project
• Clarity of documentation
• Potential of the submitting team
• Presentation grade (perhaps least important, if project is good)

 Selecting Winner

• One winner for each category
• Select based on
  •  Highest grade, if clear winner.
  • For tied/closest top grades, select the team/project whose most important categories (e.g. aligned to Thalesat mission) are superior.

For further details about the company and hackathon goto: www.thalesat.com

The post This Latest Hackathon Aims to Identify Solutions To Track Sleep Breathing Health appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

AIM is pleased to recognize companies and individuals who have delivered commendable work in the industry by adopting and implementing Analytics. These individuals have set an example for others to follow and have proven impact that’s worth celebrating.

The Machine Conference is India’s Biggest gathering of Analytics & Data Science Leaders. Analytics adoption tops our agenda as we examine the latest opportunities and challenges in a data driven world.

Theme: Put Analytics to work in India

Today analytics is considered as an integral part of every business irrespective of its nature and size. While we are surrounded by zettabyte of data and see it in all shapes of form, we still struggle to put it to the best use. At the Machine conference, we bring together the leader of Indian Analytics Industry and explore the ground-breaking innovations and the challenges that they face in analytics adoption. They share their experience with compelling use cases and inspire us with ideas that are truly game changing.

Join us at Hotel Hyatt Regency, Mumbai on 11^th May 2018 to see where the we meet the Indian Analytics innovators and leap into the future of Analytics.

You will find:

• Industry Thought-Leader sessions
• CAO Panel Discussions
• Interactive Sessions
• Sponsor Showcase
• Networking Opportunities with your colleagues from across the nation.

Analytics50 Awards

Analytics50 is an effort towards recognizing the best minds in the Indian Analytics industry who have successfully transformed data into meaningful insights.

This prestigious award celebrates the men and women behind the success of Data Science in India, who have helped in molding the Indian Analytics Landscape. These award aim to recognize and distinguish the leaders from the crowd and the innovators from the ordinary. Applicants are handpicked by our editors and industry veterans and vetted against the best in the industry.

The Machine Conference is honored to recognize recipients of Analytics50 awards for outstanding achievement in analytics for the following 5 categories

The Early Adopters

The Early Adopters Award was instituted to honor head of analytics that have successfully transformed their organizations’ overall strategic direction by embracing analytics, big data and data science.

Data Driven CxO

The Data driven CxO Awards are meant to reward executives that have successfully leveraged analytics for their business benefit. 

Exemplary Data Scientists

The Exemplary Data Scientists honors senior executives in this space who have shown exemplary history of innovation in furthering the data science as a profession.

The Sourcing Luminary

The Sourcing Luminary Award is designed to honor the enterprises that have demonstrated outstanding performance in utilizing third-party analytics services to make business operations cost-effective and agile.

Data Science Transformers

The Data Science Transformers Awards honors head of analytics who have recently embarked on a journey of data science transformation to not only deliver business value but also reinvent what the analytics department represents within an organization.

2018 nominations are now open. Winners will be recognized at the annual Machine Conference & Awards Ceremony taking place in May 2018 in Mumbai.

More Details:

Date: 11^th May 2018

Venue: Hotel Hyatt Regency Mumbai

Website: www.themachinecon.com

This is an invite only conference. Please get in touch with us for more details.

The post The Machine Conference 2018 | 11th May, Hotel Hyatt Regency, Mumbai | Meet 50 Best Minds on Analytics from Indian Firms appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

There is a buzz for AI all around and the entertainment industry is not far behind. We enjoyed some amazing movies and enthralling TV shows in 2017. And we bring to you your guide to ultimate entertainment for the year 2018. Let’s get you set for these

TV shows:

Altered carbon

Release Date: February 2^nd Netflix

ALTERED CARBON is based on Richard Morgan’s 2002 novel is set in a future where human consciousness is digitized allowing humans to survive death by having their memories and consciousness transferred into new bodies.

Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams

Release Date: Amazon Prime 12^th Jan

From the mind of the prolific sci-fi author, comes the new anthology series Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. With 10 standalone episodes and a sweeping all-star cast, each epic story will explore fantasy, humanity, and a future we’ve only begun to imagine.

Westworld Season 2

Release Date: Spring 2018

Westworld is set in the future where visitors get to interact with automatons. But what happens when the automatons mal function? West world is coming back and it would be about Chaos as mentioned by Jonathan Nolan .

Movies:                                                                            

Annihilation

Release Date: Feb 2018

Based on 2014 novel by Jeff vandermeer’s. It is adapted from the first one in the trilogy. It surrounds a biologist who goes onto an expedition after the disappearance of her husband.

Pacific Rim Uprising

Release Date: March 2018

The monster Kaiju is back in Pacific Rim’s sequel for the year 2018. Stacker Pencost’s son Jake now leads a new generation of Jaeger pilots against a new kaiju threat.

Replicas

Release Date: June 2018

A scientist fights against the laws of science to get back his family lost in a car accident.

Alita: Battle Angel

Release Date: July 2018

It is set several centuries in the future where a Cyber-doctor finds an unconscious cyborg in the scrapyard. Alita wakes up with no memory of her past in an unknown world. She fights deadly forces as she tries to discover her past. You are in for an action-packed film, with as tory of hope and empowerment.

Captive State

Release Date: August 2018

An American Sci-fi thriller it talks about the conflict between collaborators and dissidents after an occupation by an extra terrestrial force.

Ready Player One 

Release Date: March 2018

Ready player one directed by Steven Spielberg and is based on Ernest Cline’s bestseller of the same name, which has become a worldwide phenomenon. This is based in the future 2045 where the protagonist Wade Watts enters a virtual reality game to find an Easter egg. The Prize for same is to inherit all the fortune of the creator of the game.

Mortal Engines

Release Date: December 2018

An adaption of Philip Reeve’s quartet of the same name the movie is based on a futuristic, steampunk version of London, now a giant machine striving to survive on a world running out of resources.

The post 10 Upcoming Sci-fi Movies & TV Shows that Data Scientists Can Look Forward In 2018 appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Analytics in Indian business scenario has grabbed higher popularity, thanks to the growing importance on driving decisions based on data. Data and analytics is playing a key role in delivering business values, which is relatively new, but an exciting space to explore. At the helm of making analytics a part of various organisations are the leaders who are working tirelessly to make analytics and data driven decisions as seamless as possible.

Analytics India Magazine recognises 10 such influential leaders that are constantly bringing newer paradigms in the areas of analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, across varied domains.

The list is the work of over 2 months where we invited nominations from various leading organisations in India. This list is finalised primarily based on the criteria of the impact that the leader made to analytics ecosystem in India, in last 1 year. Also, uniform representation of various domains, industries etc is taken into account.

Here is the list of Top 10 Influencers in the Indian Analytics Industry, presented in alphabetical order.

Here’s the list from last year.

Ashutosh (Ash) Misra

Director of Advanced Analytics and Big Data, Philips Lighting

Currently based out of Philips Lighting Bangalore office in India, his current work as the Director of Advanced Analytics and Big Data revolves around machine learning algorithms, AI, intelligent BOTS and complex algorithms to find solution to enterprise problems. He and his team are involved globally on supply chain, sales and marketing, and finance related advanced analytics.

With more than 26 years of research and IT experience, he has worked with a large IT company for 17+ years and has handled several responsibilities in the insurance and financial services IT, including advanced analytics, big data, application development, project and program management, IT architecture consulting, Global Delivery Management, client partner role and P&L responsibilities. He has also been advisor to various fortune 500 customers on data and analytics consulting projects and has successfully delivered large programs, as a part of his previous role.

He holds a Doctorate in Physics from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur India.

Atul Jalan

Founder & CEO, Manthan

A highly accomplished entrepreneur, technology visionary and fervent speaker, Atul Jalan is the founder and CEO at Manthan which is his fourth venture after MicroTrack, Cybertrek and Net Kraft. It is very unlikely that you would find him not working on something new, and his secret sauce is imagination coupled with the ability to crank, accelerate and build momentum.

As the CEO of Manthan, his single objective is to keep the spirit of invention and innovation alive at Manthan. He is also the brain behind ‘Maya’, the world’s first AI-powered conversational agent for business analytics. Powered by Artificial Intelligence, Maya makes the most sophisticated analytics accessible to every user – an absolute democratisation of technology.

Debashish Banerjee

Managing Director, Deloitte Analytics

Bringing more than 17 years of experience in variety of analytics, predictive modelling and data science projects, he has contributed extensively in the areas of advanced analytics, actuarial risk management, data mining and predictive modelling areas. Having started his career with GE, he has established and lead insurance analytics, pricing and reserving team for GE in India—arguably one of the first of its kind in India.

He moved to Deloitte in 2005 with the primary goal to set up the advanced analytics and modeling practice in India, where is currently oversees and provides leadership to the Deloitte Consulting’s Data Science practices which focuses on big data analytics, predictive modeling, cognitive and AI. Majority of his project offerings are in customer, marketing and HR domains.

Deep Thomas

Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Aditya Birla Group

A reputed analytics expert, thought leader and a passionate evangelist of data science, Deep’s distinguished career spans more than two decades with a proven track record in delivering sustained and increasing profitability through business transformation leveraging information and digital capabilities, advanced analytics, novel processes, and multi-disciplinary talent.

As the Chief Data & Analytics Officer for Aditya Birla Group, Deep is at the helm of steering organisation-wide initiatives and transformation programs that leverage data and cutting-edge analytics solutions to enable business opportunities, growth and efficiencies across the enterprise. Prior to this, Deep was the founder CEO of Tata Insights and Quants, Tata Group’s Big data and Decision Science company. He has also held various key positions in US and India with MNCs like Citigroup, HSBC and American Express to steer their global agenda and data driven business transformation.

Kaushik Mitra

Chief Data Officer and Head of Big Data & Digital Analytics, AXA Business Services (ABS)

Kaushik has the experience of working at the intersection of technology, analytics and marketing globally for around 25 years. He has assumed leadership roles across domains such as data science, AI, modelling and analytics, business intelligence and market research.

In his current role, he is responsible for driving a culture of data innovation & digital transformation in the organisation, and is involved in driving GDPR implementation in ABS. Prior to ABS, he was with Fidelity Investments in Bangalore where he was instrumental in setting up their Data Science practice. His stay in the US included similar roles in global organisations like Microsoft, Intel and IBM, and also a stint in academia.

With a Doctorate in Marketing from the US, his work has been published in international marketing and analytics conferences and journals including American Marketing Association, Academy of Marketing Science and Decision Sciences Institute. He is also a frequent speaker in Indian industry bodies like NASSCOM and various thought leadership forums.

Paritosh Anand

Vice President and Group Head – Analytics and Strategic Initiatives, Reliance Industries Limited

As analytics head of India’s largest private sector corporation and a Fortune 500 company, Paritosh brings extensive experience in setting up and delivering analytics practices for companies like GE, Deloitte and Eaton Corporation. During his last 15 years of professional career, he has worked in different domains including risk management, marketing, manufacturing and human resources functions.

In his current role, he is building a world class cross functional analytics and decision science practice for Reliance Industries Limited. He is also heading the digitisation vertical for Reliance Hydrocarbon business on its people processes as a strategic initiative to build an integrated digital platform based function. He is a statistician by academics and enjoys working on cross functional domains and platforms integrating big data analytics with technology to provide real time decision making solutions across business and functions.

Prithvijit Roy

CEO and Co-founder, BRIDGEi2i Analytics Solutions

Even before Prithvijit Roy co-founded BRIDGEi2i Analytics Solutions, he had been at the forefront of analytics development in India since the early days. He was actively involved in setting up two of the largest analytics centres in India—Genpact & Hewlett Packard, before starting what is now one of the fastest growing analytics firms in the Asia-Pacific region.

His journey for BRIDGEi2i began in 2011. Founded on the simple belief that data can help any organisation radically transform its business, BRIDGEi2i drives action for digital transformation across numerous industry verticals through a range of analytics solutions combined with AI-powered products.

Ravi Vijayaraghavan

Vice President, Flipkart

In his current role he and his team are responsible for leveraging data, analytics and science to drive decision-making and business impact across all areas of Flipkart. Prior to joining Flipkart, Ravi was the Chief Data Scientist and Global Head of the Analytics and Data Sciences Organisation at [24]7.ai, where he invented, developed, implemented and optimised analytics and machine learning driven solutions. He has also held a variety of leadership roles at Ford Motor Company and Mu Sigma.

Ravi currently lives in Bangalore with his wife and son.

Sandeep Mittal

Managing Director, Cartesian Consulting

Over his 17+ years in the industry, Sandeep has been a driving force in helping some of the largest organisations in India and across the globe, adopt analytics and customer centricity. He has developed an analytics practice for over 100 clients, ranging from large telecom organisations, retail brands with hundreds of stores, online businesses, financial services companies, luxury hotels and resorts, airlines, and large restaurant chains.

With Cartesian he has built an organisation that has a global presence with clients in more than 10 countries. Cartesian today has a ML/ AI practice, a Digital Analytics practice, an Innovations Lab, and is building solutions that help embed analytics seamlessly into client organisations. At Cartesian, he is responsible for making sure that organisation is continually investing in capabilities, practice building and geographic expansion while also advising clients on their analytics roadmap. A regular speaker and contributor in the field, his sessions on customer analytics, storytelling with data, and the business of analytics, are highly sought after.

An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, Sandeep stays connected with music – writing and recording songs in a home studio. He also runs a web comic of his cartoons, many of which are around humour in data analytics.

Srikanth Velamakanni

Co-founder, Group Chief Executive & Executive Vice-Chairman of Fractal Analytics

Fractal Analytics, one of the most respected pure play analytics companies across the globe, aspires to power every human decision in the enterprise. Srikanth and the team at Fractal Analytics help companies leverage analytics, AI & deep learning to transform the way they make strategic, tactical and operational decisions. He is responsible for overall growth of the Fractal businesses, which include the core business of providing analytics services to Fortune 500 companies, along with Fractal’s AI based product businesses – Customer Genomics & Trial Run, Cuddle.ai and Qure.ai.

He has a BS in Electrical Engineering from IIT-Delhi and an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad. A former investment banker, he co-founded Fractal more than 18 years ago. Prior to Fractal, he has worked on structured debt transactions and collateralised bond obligations at ANZ Investment Bank and ICICI.

The post 10 Most Influential Analytics Leaders in India – 2018 appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Being Women – the Balancing Act is a series of Candid discussions focussing on the Women of today, who beautifully juggles work and family.

AIMAnalytics India Magazine: As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? What was your childhood dream?

NPNidhi Pratapneni: As a child, I think everyone’s influenced by what their parents say and do. My father was in the police service for many many years. So I had this vision of joining the police service, wearing a uniform. As the time to decide came closer and closer, my father sort of brought home the reality and frustrations he faced at work. And I said, “Well, OK, maybe we should look for something else.”

AIM: Who is the one woman who inspired you? Why?

NP: My mother has been an inspiration to me. As you asked this question, I thought of many powerful women I could name — maybe Indra Nooyi. But actually, it has been my mother all along. She has been a working woman. She had a double promotion in school, she went to Allahabad University and then to Roorkee. She was one of the first women studying Chemical Engineering there. She’s also someone who didn’t get into the IAS because she didn’t know where Fiji was! At least that’s why she thinks she didn’t get through. After she retired she reads all these old texts by Ibn Battuta and other travelers. She has constantly been learning, that’s what has really inspired me. Well if she’s been able to do that and she’s still doing it, there’s no reason for me to hold back in any way.

AIM: What defines you as a leader?

NP: I feel leadership has become a much maligned word. Everybody has their own style and I would say the style that defines me is the one where I believe in being very open and frank with people. I want to convey to them that I’m accessible for whatever it is they want to talk about. My principles are that I’m an enabler in making my organisation and my people successful. That summarises my mantra. When I’m not good at a particular thing, I need to build a strong team where I can leverage on their strengths and figure out what it is that complements mine. Creating an ecosystem where we all have our strengths, you have yours, you have certain passions, go pursue them because in the end the whole ecosystem will  benefit. So it is not just the “My way or the highway”.

AIM: What are the challenges that you faced being a woman in tech?

NP: I’m not sure, I think one faces challenges and just goes through them. Perhaps if nothing stands out for me, there wasn’t a really huge challenge. Otherwise it has been a matter of pursuing and staying persistent. There are always setbacks .When you moved back from the US to India, you think that everyone will welcome you with open arms. But that wasn’t the case for me. That was a setback, figuring out now that I’m here and my classmates are doing great things… where do I find my foothold ? What do I do? So I think that was a challenge.

Because people asked me how many people did you lead in the US? But in US managers don’t lead more than 10 people. To come back and face these questions from headhunters was challenging. So looking back I don’t think that was a challenge but it was a tough period that I had to work through and then the normal ebbs and flows of raising the kids and building your career in parallel. The whole, I call it the GMS — the Guilty Mom Syndrome! PMS, GMS you know! It characterises women quite well.

AIM: How do your peers react to a woman leader?

NP: I feel that I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had people who have been very helpful very respectful. Part of it probably comes from the places you’ve been to, and they acknowledge that. If somebody has worked in XYZ places or been to certain institutions there must be something to her, which is a stereotype that has worked in my favor. It works against people in some situations. Having worked in MNCs all through, having been able to find certain people who’ve been there to guide me and to advise me. I can think that way so there are probably subliminal things that go on. There is society that we are in, part of it is an acceptance we as women can also go through.

If some woman from the US were to come in my place, perhaps she would feel that there are sub-texts within the ecosystem that I don’t feel, because I grew up in this world. But otherwise I found a lot of acceptance. I do feel that where women would want to project themselves in forums like you offer as a magazine. In other forums that women won’t step forward and take those opportunities and to some extent they are not even invited as much as they should be. I was just thinking maybe we should do some statistics on how many panel discussions happen and how many women panelists are on there ? and I’ve been to a forum organised by NASSCOM in Hyderabad which was only for women. And sometimes you ask yourself the question why should it be an only women’s only forum ?

When what you are talking about is Big data. Now what is it about big data that makes it a women-only forum ? But people then feel that a lot more women do participate at those events. Even though there’s nothing that is going to be discussed that is pertaining to gender. So maybe some of those are needed. Maybe there is an explicit need to also project women in those panel discussions as presenting a different perspective , to say that there are women who have a seat at the table and at those in the audience find that very normal and think of themselves in being those roles.

AIM: Equal pay for equal work, where does the tech industry stand on this?

NP: I think there are two aspects, there is a tech industry that is a lot of MNCs, those who are more forward-thinking and who feel that there is a definite commitment towards gender issues. And then there are many other smaller shops where there is scope for discrimination. There isn’t much vigilance to ensure what is happening. When I talk about MNCs and that kind of environment. There is definitely a commitment to give that equal pay for equal work it doesn’t always happen and there are many nuances as to why its not happening.

Part of it is , that women also will not negotiate that much, and this is something that I personally learnt later in my career. That it’s OK to have those discussions around compensation when you are being made an offer. I feel it is still harder even now to do that negotiation while I’m in a role because I’m in it. Whatever I need to work through and the system should give me what I deserve. But at the point at which you are being made an offer and you need to negotiate, many women will not do that. There is a sense that “my husband is the primary earner and whatever I’m getting is over and above that, why fight for it”?

When we are OK mostly, so it needs to be driven from both dimensions. I think women should be more empowered to ask and organisations need to develop systems where they are tracking it, analysing it. Whether people in the same role are getting the same or not. If they are not it’s still OK I mean..one can’t even push through and say equal work-equal pay when the woman might not be as good as a performer as the man right. So all of this needs to be done but not at the cost of making excuses to somebody’s performance, it has to be merit based I feel.

AIM: What are the issues women face when coming back from maternity ?

NP: That’s a big one, I’m almost 13 years past that time, but I think it is very very relevant. It’s not something I went through over here; my personal experiences are from the US. For a woman who wants to work, one she has to overcome that guilty mom syndrome and how do you overcome it ? You need the support of your workplace that you’ve been part of and you need support from your social ecosystem, your families and friends. Your family should be supportive that this is something that you need to be doing. You don’t want the guilt to be multiplied two or three times when you decide you want to get back. Your husband has to be quite supportive as well and you know as far as the organisation is concerned is what role do you come back in? What are you comfortable with?

There are policies that do get made, at the same time there has to be a very individual conversation on what’s right for this particular person. There are discussions one is part of to say that OK. This person’s raise is scaled down because she was on maternity leave for some time. In those conversations one needs to actively educate people to say, during that period the person is an earning team member and to what extent to scale down the raise whether you do that or not becomes something where you need to drill that education into both male and female managers. That becomes a challenge, so there are lot of dynamics at play. It’ll be a while before we  get it perfect. I think there are some women who have had a great experience coming back from maternity. And possibly in organisations it is to showcase those women and those learnings for others to make it a great transition back to the workplace.

AIM: Work or family — what is important in the eyes of the society today?

NP: For both men and women, working or otherwise, the priority has become work as well as family. It’s just that society becomes a little more preachy when it comes to women. People will appreciate women who achieve things, who win acclaim. When it’s your friend’s daughter who is featured in a newspaper, the father may go, “Oh look she’s in the newspaper and she’s done all this great stuff”. But when it comes to his own daughter or daughter-in-law it might be, “Well you just had a child.

You need to give the child four or five years”. I don’t think people realise that people are being hypocritical; so how do you educate them? It will be a while because you need the support of the same people who seem to be pulling you back. So it’s a tough dynamic. Women need to realise that perhaps they can’t be perfect at both. You can’t give your 100% to both. “Do you do a 50-50 or do you do a 70-30 at one time and then switch it around to 30-70 at another time?”  Those are ways that one needs to decide for one self. So its each person has to chart their own course and what works for them.

AIM: How did you balance family and work?

NP: It’s been great to have my husband, who was in the business school with me. He understands a lot of the challenges that people face in organisations. And sometimes he’s able to add his own perspective, of how I am navigating or not standing up and saying no to certain things. It’s been a great partnership. Even on the work aspect I get a lot of advice on that front and on the family side it’s been either my in-laws, who have been with me for quite some time or my parents who have been always been there when I was in Gurgaon. They were there to step in whenever I needed it. So leveraging the family support system has worked very well.

AIM: An instance or experience which motivated you to push the barriers

NP: I’m not sure which barriers but there was an instance which was a turning point for me. This was when I was working in India, I had moved back. I was doing the work of three people. I was managing a team of 20 people — two of the other leaders had moved out so I was managing Asia and Europe and also the role of the person who was supposed to supervise both of those, because he had moved to an external role. So I killed myself doing it. Enjoyed it a lot and I felt that people should be taking notice that I’m doing this. I am doing the work of three people and managing things, addressing any fires that come up without much of an issue. And when it came to the next stage of saying OK then what do I get for it? It was pretty much nothing.

Because somebody else was being brought into lead the team and this certain person was a professor who had managed teams at all. So I’m like here I am who’s been through this business all through and now you want someone else to come lead the team. Where does that leave me? So kudos to the person who did come in though, because after I finished my transition I sat him down and said, “Look I’ve told you about all the team members now you need to listen to my story.” And then I shared with him my struggles, my frustrations and he was very very supportive and he said you know thank you for letting me know and I will figure out why things didn’t work out and get back to you.

He became my partner and actually coached me and told me, “Look here are the three things that I’ve heard…” And in the end I was the one who took the leadership to say, “OK…they want to see ABC things here’s what I am going to do.” Because nobody was telling me what to do and then you realise that there are seniors and leaders out there and yes while they are great in their own roles, but often times they are so busy they have no clue. It’s great for you to take your destiny in your own hands and say “OK…here are the seven things that you agree with them or not”. Once you have the agreement in support then you can really chart your course and say that OK after three months I have done all of this, now do you have any hesitation?

And so I was able to move on to next level. So I feel that was an instance where I pushed the barriers. I had conversations which were very tough. It was tough for me to hear the feedback as well and tough for me to make to have conversations where I put myself ahead of everyone else. But it did work out and it was a huge positive and I think that’s one of the advice I gave to many people that I mentor or speak to. You build the things that you want to do and that’s because that’s where your passions will lie.

AIM: What is your support system?

NP: My family…my parents, my in-laws my husband. My children now that they are much older, are able to take care of a lot of things themselves. But I think on the professional front a huge support system has been a lot of the people I worked with and my peers and seniors over the years. So while this is not something one is proud of, I have worked in several different companies and in each company you find people who you respect and it’s great that one is able to reach out to them to advice later on. So for example when I was in Dunnhumby, there were a lot of youngsters in my team and now they are in senior positions and I look to reaching out to them to either get advice or if there are people who worked with them, for talent and hiring and bouncing those questions off of them.

In Dell there were several others of that nature. The one person who many many people in Bengaluru know is Pankaj Rai and coming across him and just understanding the way he just advises people, gets them to think of larger scheme of things was very beneficial to me. I think that carried through and then you find that as you do this you build your network. As youngsters you’re told that networking is a bad thing, this guy is networking and oh he’s doing something he shouldn’t do. But when you build it gradually as a natural course then you realise that network does play a role. For example in Dell – this manager came up to me and said I’m looking for somebody to head my social media team and would you want to do that ? And I was working with Pankaj at that time and I said that I have no social media experience if I were apply to a job nobody would give me this job. Here is someone who is willing to take me on because of what they’ve seen me do and so I said let me just jump at it, otherwise it’s not an opportunity that’s going to come to me again. So that was a byproduct that network and support system that I have built.

AIM: What do corporates lack while implementing gender diversity ?

NP: I think many corporates have started moving ahead beyond the numbers. Some might still be in a position where it’s merely looking at number of women in organisation. So you should be achieving those numbers but with an insistence that you are not compromising on quality. Then when you go beyond that, it is how inclusive are you making your workforce. When you are driving gender diversity programmes, who is taking the lead on those and who is part of that conversation? If men are not a part of that conversation, then we are really doing a great disservice and then we are not moving that conversation as fast as it could progress. I think it’s the responsibility of the women as well to also educate their peers. If it is a senior woman leader who is talking about her experiences and her challenges, if the male manager isn’t there, who will benefit from it?

AIM: Saree or suit ? What empowers you more in the boardroom?

NP: I’ve started wearing sarees to office very recently — only in the last 3-4 years. I am comfortable in them, but at the same time, if I need to dress for an event I think wearing a saree would distract from the conversation? Because, if there are people who are not used to seeing me in a saree. I would want my message to go across rather than people thinking, why is she wearing a saree today. I’ve been comfortable in suits. They will not raise that many eyebrows but for a woman who’s used to wearing sarees all the time if she suddenly shows up in a suit, it will be a different thing.

AIM: Your advice to other women in tech ?

NP: I would say women in tech is a phrase that shouldn’t put you off, don’t feel inhibited by it. Because tech is increasingly becoming a space that is valuing the arts as well. It’s great that we have reached this stage so I would say this message is not for women in tech, it’s for women in any discipline which will find a role in analytics, because when you talk about business decisions, business decisions impact the factors that play into how a consumer thinks, how a consumer behaves. Many of these are aspects of sociology of behavioral sciences as well.

The second piece I’d like to say is that learning is constant. My generation grew up at a time when  studying ABCD things start working and that’s a new chapter. We constantly have to tell ourselves that we need to learn and keep ourselves up-to-date on what’s happening in terms of cutting-edge trends and technology. So I would like to encourage women to have that mindset that learning is constant. There was a recent statistic shared by Coursera, that of the people who take their courses, the percentage of women taking them is much lower than the percentage of men. So that is a dynamic where I think when women move into a phase where they have to juggle that work, family and everything. The ability to take time out to invest in yourself, to invest in learning then women tend to hesitate or tend to say that how do I make it happen and they really aren’t able to jump in.

They can’t do the things they want to do , that might be even required from their workplace. So I would say one figure out how to do that learning if there is a way within your organisations to do it in a more structured way, where it’s part of your work and its required of you perhaps you might be forced to do it. You might go ahead and do it but, that’s something that is paramount in age, to keep adding to your skillset, to figure out which best way you can find to be able to do that.

AIM: Your advice to corporates on how to retain women employees

NP: A lot of attrition takes place when women need to focus on their family. Either when their children are very young or during the phase where they are in school, where they need more help. It’s a matter of encouraging those one-on-one discussions with women. I’m not sure that it is happening; and if there can be concerted efforts around doing that. Identify those who are in the fragile phase, and have specific conversations that say that “This is why we are having a conversation. What is it that will make you more comfortable in terms of being able to balance work and other priorities that you may have and can we structure something for you?” It’s harder to do in certain startups. In environments it might not make sense but in many other companies there is a greater willingness to do it. But how you make that connect to realise it for your women employees is a bit of a question mark and I would encourage those one-on-one conversations than customising things for women.

The post Women in Analytics – Nidhi Pratapneni, VP and Head of Knowledge services at Wells Fargo appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Here’s the second part of our series Being Women – the Balancing Act, where we have candid discussions focussing on the women of today, who beautifully juggle work and family. We spoke with some of the most prominent women from the Indian Analytics Industry this INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY.

We spoke with Rohini Srivathsa, an accomplished business leader, and consulting and R&D professional. She has close to 25 years of experience in business and analytics leadership roles internationally. Rohini started her career at AT&T Bell Labs working in the data science, modeling and visualization domains. For the last decade, she has engaged in business and strategy consulting at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and lBM, around topics of customer, market, digital transformation and analytics, with focus on emerging markets.  

Analytics India Magazine: As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? What was your childhood dream?

RS: I don’t remember any one specific dream growing up as a child. I had a very curious mind and my parents instilled in me a strong sense of wonder by helping me ask ‘why’ and ‘how’. My dad was an army officer and a quintessential engineer. There was always a dismantled gadget at home somewhere! He would be trying to repair it, figuring out how it worked; I guess that’s how I turned out to be an engineer. And I think that sense of curiosity has stayed with me throughout.

AIM: Who is the one woman who inspired you? Why?

RS: I was really inspired by Kiran Bedi. I was in my early teens at the time when she became the first woman IPS officer. I remember being inspired by her courage, her commitment to doing what’s right and her creativity. Over the years, I have followed her career off and on, and have seen her take some interesting approaches to solving problems. Like introducing meditation techniques like Vipassana in Tihar jail.

AIM: What defines you as a leader?

RS: Purpose, integrity and empathy — these are the three qualities that I value highly in a leader and try to aspire towards. I think people look up to leaders in an organization for a sense of direction, a vision, a ‘why’. Integrity is the ‘how’ of pursuing that ‘why’. That ‘how’ is about transparency, consistency and fairness. People see that about you over a period of time. The third quality is empathy. As you work with people from very different backgrounds internationally, people with very different points of view, I think having a sense of empathy is critical in being able to take people along.

AIM: What are the challenges that you faced being a woman in tech?

RS: I have been very fortunate to have really amazing mentors very early on in my career: my Ph.D. advisor and my manager at my first job at AT&T Bell Labs. They were people who inspired me, who encouraged me to aspire to be my best. There might have been prevalent biases, but I don’t remember consciously thinking much about them, at least early on in my career.

AIM: How do your peers react to a woman leader?

RS: I think the world has come a long way; there are a lot more women in senior positions than they were maybe a decade ago. I think of myself as a leader who happens to be a woman. I look at first building relationships with my peers and then seek the ability to influence. There are times when my peers or others in the organization may have a reaction or a point of view, which may be rooted in an unconscious bias. I usually call it out; but I think the fact that I have first worked on the relationship and have created a connect, helps in that communication.

AIM: Equal pay for equal work, where does the tech industry stand on this?

RS: ‘Equal pay for equal work’ has been a topic that has come to the surface in the last five to six years. We have a long way to go, both in terms of representation of women in technology all through the ranks as well as on compensation matters. Leaders, both men and women, in the industry have to consciously work in that direction – towards fairness and the greater good of the entire ecosystem.

AIM: What are the issues women face when coming back from maternity?

RS: I think coming back from maternity leave is a huge milestone in the life of any woman. It’s a time period when she is facing challenges both internally and externally — internally, the woman is feeling stretched in a role that she has never done before, and then professionally as well, she is being evaluated in many ways — so it’s a very delicate time. I think both men and women can proactively prepare much better for this milestone. The most important ingredient in this preparation is open communication. I remember working with my first manager almost six months in advance in preparation for maternity – both time away and transition back – and receiving complete professional and moral support.

AIM: Work or family — what is important in the eyes of the society today?

RS: I think it depends on who are the stakeholders. As more and more women are getting into the workforce, work is gaining importance. Traditionally, the broader community still considers family more important. The question is what’s important to you and who is important in your life — because the reality is that you cannot please everybody!

AIM: How did you balance family and work?

RS: I don’t think I have been very good at this. I have ended up being in a state of imbalance over long stretches of time. There are times when work takes precedence, and there are other times when the family takes precedence. So, I guess over time, they balance each other out. As I have grown older, I think I have learned to keep my priorities straight, but it’s been hard to define ‘balance’.

AIM: Tell us about an instance which motivated you to push the barriers

RS: I can reflect upon a lesson in leadership when I was leading a global team of senior Subject Matter Experts. Our mandate was to help solve and develop large technology transformation deals for clients around the world, mostly in emerging markets. It was important to be nimble, creative, and most of all, collaborative in order to succeed. At one time, there was a sudden requirement to be in Kazakhstan to help shape a business transformation agenda for the country’s President’s office.

I could sense some hesitation in my team, perhaps because of the urgency and ambiguity of the requirement. I remember thinking that if I was expecting my team to rise up to the challenge, I have to be willing to push myself as well. I ended up going to Kazakhstan three times that summer and working some crazy hours to shape that assignment. It was an amazing experience and I learned a lot. I think that incident got my team to rally around me even more, knowing that I was willing to take up whatever challenge I expected them to.

AIM: What is your support system?

RS: You need to have a network in place, a support system, to make sure that things keep moving along in life. Over different periods, my husband, my family, my in-laws, and my parents have been deeply supportive of my professional goals. Friends and neighbors have also offered that safety net that one needs through different stages of life.

AIM: What do corporates lack while implementing gender diversity?

RS: I think corporates are starting to pay more attention to gender diversity and that is a good thing. Diversity, in all its forms, has merits in terms of ideas, approaches and creating business value. Different corporations are in different stages of their journey. Broadly, corporates need to imbibe the notion of flexibility, of focus on contribution rather than face-time. Other aspects that corporates can do better on is to unearth unconscious biases that are present in all of us, despite our best intentions.

AIM: Saree or Suit? What empowers you more in the boardroom?

RS: I think what empowers me in the boardroom is what value I bring to the table – in terms of my contribution and the impact that I create. What I choose to wear is an expression; I consider my choice of attire as a way to connect with people: does it allow me to connect with my stakeholders, relate to people, in a way that helps to achieve the objectives of that conversation.

AIM: Your advice to other women in Tech?

RS: My advice to other women in tech would be to: one, keep learning throughout your life and never let yourself get complacent. Second is to find mentors, meet people, don’t restrict yourself to your immediate, familiar network. Third would be to take risks. There will be periods in your life when you may be somewhat risk-averse, and that’s ok. But at other times, push yourself and take a few calculated risks to keep moving forward.

AIM: Your advice to corporates on how to retain Women employees?

RS: As the numbers show, many women enter the workforce but as years progress, there is a significant dropout. This could be attributed to life-work balance issues. I think corporates need to consciously think about supporting both men and women through different stages of life. I’m a big proponent of men being just as involved in different aspects of family life, and so, their needs are just as important. I think retention of women is closely linked to conscious support for both men and women in terms of flexibility, focus on contribution, and an empathetic and holistic mindset.

Corporates can also do better in terms of offering mentorship opportunities, especially as women grow in their careers. Because there just aren’t enough role models. I have greatly benefited from mentorship by some remarkable leaders among men in my career. The third area is the ability to have frank conversations about unconscious biases. Some organizations are beginning to focus on this proactively, but I haven’t seen that consistently across enterprises.

The post Women In Analytics – Rohini Srivathsa, Data Science, ML & AI Leader appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Hackathons have been an alluring way to celebrate and engage data science community,  centered around solving unique business problems. In India, hackathons have gained immense popularity, given a host of advantage it poses—honing data science skills, learn new technologies, identifying areas of interest, forming a community, building reputation in the community—hackathons have been a great way to explore these options. In the past few years it has helped developers push their boundaries and explore their newer selves.

Introducing MachineHack—An initiative by Analytics India Magazine

To keep the data science community intrigued, we have recently launched an online platform that hosts hackathons and discussion platforms, called MachineHack. It promises to offer an engaging and competing platform, boosting data science professionals to elevate their skills to newer heights.

MachineHack offers an online platform where current and future data scientists, machine learning enthusiasts can compete on various real world problems, and find solutions using tools in machine learning and data science. The idea is to bring a platform that can act as a springboard for developers to test, hone and showcase their skills.

Suiting both beginners and expert level coders, the hackathons at MachineHack are curated by industry experts and developers, so that it is relevant for data science enthusiasts at all proficiency levels. The platform brings challenging projects enabling them to improve their skills, collaborate and compete like never before.

In a nutshell, MachineHack provides an excellent opportunity to test and showcase your machine learning skills by competing against hundreds of data scientists across the country.

How it works?

You can participate in online hackathons designed exclusively by our experts by signing up for free. You can create a username by filling up details like email id, name, location, bio, work experience, organisation working for, among others. Each hackathon lists a detailed overview of the problem statement, along with other details such as background, prizes, evaluation, criteria, duration of hackathon, levels etc.

The next step is downloading the data, which comes as training and test data. Based on the training data you have to work on the problem and create machine learning models. Once the problem has been worked upon using your preferred machine learning techniques and tools, you have to submit the filled in test data.

Your results are compared to that of others by our team of experts, who would check your submission along with the code, and include your score in the leaderboard. The ones who have the closest proximity to our results, will lead it. This is a major highlight of the hackathons at MachineHack, as your performance in the leaderboard can be a major attraction point for data science recruiters.

The other aspect of MachineHack is discussion and collaboration. Each hackathon has a dedicated discussion board, where the participants can collaborate with each other over problems and finding its solutions. This not only provides a platform to upgrade your knowledge, but developing a strong sense of community and network data scientists across the globe.

MachineHack will host hackathons designed around NLP, image recognition and other branches of AI in the future.

Visit us here.

This website allows you to

• Discover & evaluate talented data scientists
• Climb the machine learning leaderboard
• Receive community feedback & guidance
• Build your network on discussion board
• Attract data science recruiters with leaderboard performance

Currently listed hackathon

The very first hackathon listed by MachineHack is “Predicting House Prices In Bengaluru”. A beginner level hackathon, it will last over 180 days, where data scientists have to build a model to predict the price oh houses in Bengaluru.

The train and test data will consist of various features that describe property in Bengaluru. This is an actual data set that is curated over months of primary & secondary research by our team. Access the complete information here.

The post Compete, Code And Collaborate At MachineHack, An Online Platform For Hackathons and Discussions On Machine Learning appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Here’s the third part of our series Being Women – the Balancing Act, where we have candid discussions focussing on the women of today, who beautifully juggle work and family. We spoke with some of the most prominent women from the Indian Analytics Industry this INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY.

We spoke with Sowjanya Shetty who is currently serving as Senior Director at GE Digital in Bangalore.

Analytics India Magazine: As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? What was your childhood dream?

Sowjanya Shetty: My growing-up years, I always had wonderful math teachers and I totally enjoyed the subject. So much that I wanted to be a math teacher when I grew up! Math is one subject which requires both a good problem comprehension and an excellent solving ability and cannot be crammed. Many profound mathematical ideas don’t require advanced skills to appreciate. Even now in our day-to-day functioning, we are not using formulas or variables like x and y, but we always face situations where we need to make decisions, analyze and weigh things regarding its relevance. All these things are related to Mathematics, isn’t it?

AIM: Who is the one woman who inspired you? Why?

SS: It’s always been my Mom. My dad passed away when I was just three years old, and my mother took charge and she made a way for my sister and me. We all take from our parents a set of expectations of what is it we are supposed to do. From my mom, I learned to appreciate and value independent women, balancing work and family, financial planning, resilience, egalitarian views, open communication and a lot more. Her efficiency made our lives comfortable.

AIM: What defines you as a leader?

SS: I believe that being a leader is a choice and not a rank. There are three innate characteristics about me. Firstly, I am a big follower of servant leadership, it’s all about influencing, trusting, listening, communicating and understanding people. Secondly, I strive to build relationships and continuously learn from others. Thirdly, over the years I’ve internalized a design thinking mindset that finds ways to balance between analytical, creative and practical thinking. These three facets about me collectively allow me to think out of the box when faced with a problem and I think in a lot of ways defines my leadership style.

AIM: What are the challenges that you faced being a woman in tech?

SS: I’ve worked in teams where I was the only girl, to teams where there were more women than men. There are some petty slights and feelings of alienation that women experience every now and then. However, there is a silver lining: Having worked in the tech space for more than 20 years, I think for women who come out on the other side, there can be great satisfaction. In fact, now that I’ve matured in my field, I think that in some ways women in tech may have it better than men. After all, we do stand out. And if we’re confident enough to be ourselves, we bring a different perspective to our companies – one they really need, and which more and more of them know they need.

AIM: Equal pay for equal work, where does the tech industry stand on this?

SS: I see a big discrepancy in this regard and I think we have a long way to go. Not only in the tech industry but across sectors. I believe that the first step towards this is for companies to be transparent about gender pay issues. Recently I read that Adobe in India announced pay parity aimed at abolishing the gender pay disparity. I like that approach. Most tech companies have a long way to go.

AIM: What issues do women face after they come back from maternity leave?

SS: Becoming a mother is a life changer for all women. There are many books, blogs, and advice from experienced folks around being great parents. However, no one prepares you for what it means and takes to be a mother; what happens to you mentally and physically. I had to go back to work three months after my daughter was born. I had a wonderful manager and a very young but accommodating team. The picture isn’t that rosy for all though. The key is to plan appropriately and make all necessary arrangements both in your professional as well as personal life to enable a smooth comeback. When you return to work soon after childbirth (or even months later), you will be navigating physical and hormonal changes, self-doubt coupled with the usual stresses of deadlines and meeting project milestones. That said, this adjustment period is a finite one. Delegate to give others a chance to help you cope.

AIM: Work or family — what is important in the eyes of the society today?

SS: According to the society, a woman’s preference should be family. My life revolves around my family. But I derive joy and passion from work, and I won’t choose one over the other.

AIM: How did you balance family and work?

SS: I’m a living example of the saying, “Hire a lazy person in your team and they’ll figure out the most effective and efficient way of doing things.” In India, it is much easier to maintain a work-life balance because of the support system you can build around yourself — you can hire someone to cook, clean, drive, etc. I can, therefore, spend time on things that are important like family and me-time. It’s all about delegating.

AIM: Tell us about an instance which motivated you to push the barriers.

SS: I attended a workshop on unconscious bias and it was an eye-opener for me. We (a group of industry leaders, HR professions, and young engineers – both men and women) were made to stand in a single line and were blindfolded. We were then asked questions like, “Were your parents educated”, “Did your parents have jobs when you were growing up”, “Did you have the luxury to walk out of the house at night without being scared,” etc. We had to take a step forward every time the answer was “yes”. I’ve always had egalitarian views, but this exercise made me realize that diversity is not just limited to gender, but extends to age, physical abilities, sexual orientation, age and many more attributes. I’ve since then worked on my own biases and strived to create and work in inclusive cultures.

AIM: What is your support system?

SS: Like I said, I take all the help I am offered. I have a huge support system – my live-in help, my mom and my mom-in-law. My husband is the center of my support system, that place I always go to talk things through, whether it’s a feeling of joy or fear. He always has an ear for it and the best advice.

AIM: What do corporates lack while implementing gender diversity?

SS: Diversity is more a number for many organizations. Earlier it used to be 33 percent, now it’s 50 percent. I remember feeling like a “diversity poster girl” when I got my first big promotion. I earned the promotion but felt like I was entitled to it, just because I am a woman. I think we have come a long way since then

AIM: Saree or Suit? What empowers you more in the boardroom?

SS: It doesn’t matter if it’s a saree or a suit. You walk in with confidence, own the seat that you sit in, and you speak for what you represent. I think it’s just you.

AIM: Your advice to women in tech?

SS: Moving from middle level to senior level management is a tricky thing. When you are in the mid-level management, you tend to get comfortable — you’ve built your network, you have your mentors. But moving to a senior level management is different. The first piece of advice to all women in tech is to network – make connections horizontally in your organization and outside your organization. They will come in handy as you go up. There will be friends everywhere. Second advice is to know the finances of your organization.

AIM: Your advice to corporates on how to retain Women employees?

SS: It helps if the company is aware that a woman employee is trying to maintain a work-life balance. Flexibility, good relationship with your managers, and camaraderie with teammates — these things are crucial to a woman. I worked for 15 years in an organization, despite getting better job offers, because of the work environment. Even now, at GE Digital, that flexibility and understanding is a crucial part.

The post Women In Analytics – Sowjanya Shetty, Senior Director at GE Digital appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Here’s the fourth part of our series Being Women – the Balancing Act, where we have candid discussions focussing on the women of today, who beautifully juggle work and family. We spoke with some of the most prominent women from the Indian Analytics Industry this INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY.

Anshu Sharma Raja is a Senior Vice President at Vodafone India Limited. She heads the IT infrastructure for the company in India.

Prior to this she was a Senior  Director and a part of the India leadership team at AIG in India. In that role, Anshu was successfully able to seed and grow the Data Science function for AIG in India.

Anshu has nearly 20 years of experience, almost all of it in the financial-tech industry. She started her career programming in C++ and has since then taken on roles for leading and managing large programs and product development distributed across multiple geographies for global financial institutions.

She has also worked at Goldman Sachs in Bangalore, where apart from leading large global infrastructure programs, she was also the regional lead for market data function.

Anshu is passionate about guiding women returning to technical careers after a break, and mentors young women who aspire to have technical careers. She holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Science from Bangalore University and has undergone an executive general management program at Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore.

Analytics India Magazine: As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? What was your childhood dream?

Anshu Sharma Raja: I was born and raised in a large joint family, where most of the women were teachers. So it was quite natural that I had the inclination of becoming a teacher one day. I was a curious kid but a very happy go lucky one. Knowing how things work, know about things in general around us, facts and trivia interested me a lot. Though I grew up in a large joint family, there were no inhibitions. We were raised as freethinkers and having a point of view was never discouraged. As a child I knew that I wanted to pursue something in the field of science and technology, particularly in the mathematics area. Did I have keen thoughts of becoming an engineer one day? Perhaps not. But as it turned out I followed my interest and turned to Computer Science engineering and made a career out of it!

AIM: Who is the one woman who inspired you? Why?

ASR: It is difficult to pick one inspiring woman, there are so many; but if I have to choose, I would say it’s my mother. She has had a great career as a much revered maths teacher, has been a doting parent, loving wife, an all rounder – somebody I always look up to. If anyone could manage work and demands of a large family, it is her. All this while remaining her individual personality, finding her me-time and following her passions. It’s from her that I got my value system of managing both work and personal life.  She set a role model for me and taught me to dream big and that everything else will fall in place.

AIM: What defines you as a leader?

ASR: Empathy, sense of purpose and challenging the status quo is what inspires me and that I constantly strive for as a leader. Leadership is not about doing it all by yourself, one cannot. It’s about creating that atmosphere where the team wants to do their best, and give their best.

AIM: What are the challenges that you faced being a woman in tech?

ASR: I cannot recall any ‘challenges’ being a being a woman in tech — but as a working woman one encounters stereotypes that are deep rooted in the environment around us at work, home and the society in general. For example, a lot of times assumptions are made on behalf of the women regarding their suitability of certain type of roles, or their ability to work odd/long hours or even travel. As a woman in the workforce I had to demonstrate that I was up for technical roles that were largely male territory, and a lot of times to ask for those roles and responsibilities. So I would say that it’s not specifically in the technology sector, but it indeed is up to women to break these stereotypes.

AIM: How do your peers react to a woman leader?

ASR: While reactions are personal and individual, organization culture is a big influencer. Through my career while at some places there was absolutely no difference — I was instantly welcomed to the party (laughs!) at some other places, it took a while for them to accept and acknowledge my presence, skill and expertise. It takes a while to break the ice with certain set of individuals, and once they understand the competency you bring to the table, most often than not it becomes a collaborative path to achieving the organizational vision.

AIM: Equal pay for equal work, where does the tech industry stand on this?

ASR: There is a big ground to cover, honestly. It’s not only in the tech industry, but all industries in general. Tech industry employs a lot of women. Straight from the colleges and growing into senior ranks in the corporate world. Interestingly, when women are hired at campus, everybody starts at an equal pay.  But somewhere the bias creeps in. There are a lot of pioneering companies that have set an example of equal pay for both men and women. But there is a lot of ground to cover.

AIM: What are the issues women face when coming back from maternity leave?

ASR: Motherhood is a non trivial event in a woman’s life – with physical and emotional changes. Coupled with the fact that there is a great sense of insecurity with respect to the work and workplace  – about the role, about the position, and a lot of times self-doubt, if they’d be able to manage work and expectations of a new mother. It gets compounded by the fact that perhaps the manager, co-workers and sometimes folks at home may have similar doubts too! The best way to deal with it is to speak openly and ask – ask for the role, ask for settling down time, similarly at home front too, ask for support and setup your ecosystem – this way the transition back will be easier.

AIM: Work or family — what is important in the eyes of the society today?

ASR: That’s a tricky one! The society around us expects women to be super women – it reminds me of a cover page of a magazine that I had seen which had the woman of today as a goddess with multiple arms stretched out holding gadgets, kitchen tools and what not. So the society perhaps expects the women to have a squeaky clean home, kitchen full of freshly cooked food, to be a caring homemaker and at the same time bring home a fat salary as well! It really doesn’t matter what the society wants of you. I strongly believe that one has be clear about what they want for themselves. Once you define that for yourself and align it with whoever your inner circle is (partner, spouse, parents, in-laws, kids), everything else is then inconsequential. That’s how you garner support and motivation to keep at it.

AIM: How did you balance family and work?

ASR: The whole work-life balance has been an eternal debate – and by virtue of physics anything you try to balance will rest on natural tension – so very early in my career I threw this notion out of the window, and have strived to create a harmonious work-life integration and minimize the tension. Between global roles, the world becoming flatter and modern day technology, there is no clear demarcation of work anymore. The trick is to plan and prioritize sometimes daily and sometimes hourly too.  It’s not a formula, but a practice of time management, planning, and the ability to quickly context switch, creating a support ecosystem around you and leveraging available technology to the hilt.

AIM: Tell us about an instance which motivated you to push the barriers.

ASR: I don’t think I have ever encountered a barrier, yes there were challenges but not a barrier. Even as a little girl growing up, there was never a doubt in my mind that I may not work, or be financially independent. There were life altering changes, like moving cities, getting married, the birth of my two children but they were never barriers. In my current role I am a weekend mother and wife. I work out of a different city and commute back to Bangalore over the weekend, but I never saw it as a barrier. It took some getting used to, but my family, and the support at home makes it easier than it sounds. Career to me is a marathon and there will be bumps on the way, its how one views it that makes all the difference.

AIM: What is your support system?

ASR: I am fortunate to be in India where one can build a network of support system. But my biggest support system is my family – my husband who has gracefully taken over the role of both parents from Monday to Friday, my two boys who cheer for their mum, my parents and in-laws for their unwavering faith in me and a good fortune of having trusted friends. I must also mention Lalitha, who is more than a nanny to my children and who has spent nearly 10 years with us caring for the family. For me to be able to give my full attention at work creating a trusted system was not just important but essential.

AIM: What do corporates lack while implementing gender diversity?

ASR: A lot of times the fundamental thing lacking is intent. I think corporates really need to ask themselves why they are focusing on gender diversity. Is it just a metric they want to report on, or do they really want to see their workplace, meeting rooms and more importantly board rooms at a 50-50 male and female ratio? It may not be enough to attract diverse talent to join the organization, the organization will also need to work nurturing the talent towards success.

AIM: Saree or Suit ? What empowers you more in the boardroom?

ASR: Power dressing for me is not about a saree or a suit. It is the confidence and expertise that one brings to the meeting which empowers you in the boardroom.

AIM: Your advice to other women in tech

ASR: My advice would be first to not confuse a job with a career – so get clarity of thought within oneself if one wants a job or a career. If it’s a career that one is seeking then you would need to enable yourself to be a success and make sure your work is as important as other elements of your life. Enabling your support system, creating a career plan for yourself, investing time in building work relationships with colleagues, mentors and sponsors constantly learning, staying technical will then become a way of life.

AIM: Your advice to corporates on how to retain Women employees?

ASR: Stats show that while at entry level it’s a 50:50 class that joins the workforce but over 10 years the percentage of women in the workplace drops down significantly. While Corporates are putting their energies behind hiring more women, what can certainly help to retain more women and see them grow is to internalize the culture of inclusion – for example masking names while shortlisting resumes seem to help eliminate bias at this very preliminary stage. Ensuring that for every promotion potential women candidates are also stacked up and to enable them to succeed. A lot of organizations have also invested in people centric policies  be it for flexible working hours or having a child care centre, or a holistic performance review system. These little things act as enablers for both men and definitely women to bring their best at work.

The post Women In Analytics – Anshu Sharma Raja, SVP Technology Infrastructure at Vodafone appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.