Top 17 Competitive Data Scientists From India on Kaggle

“Data Scientist: Sexiest Job of the 21st century”- Harvard Business Review, 2012

Talking of more recent times, Glassdoor also named it the “best job of the year” for 2016.

Where did the title “Data Scientist” come from?

It has been there in the market for less than a decade. It was coined by Dr. Dhanurjay Patil, the Chief Data Scientist at the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Jeff Hammerbacher, the Chief Scientist at Cloudera, in 2008.

Data Science has turned into a mainstream business practice from being a very niche field of study. It has been on the top of the lists of best sought-after and paid jobs. Companies in India too are pushing to hire data scientists.

If you are looking for some motivation to work as a data scientist in India, I have put together a list of the top 17 data scientists in India with information about their academic credentials, professions, and achievements. This list is based on their current ranking (out of 53476) on Kaggle.

Bishwarup Bhattacharjee (Current Rank: 9)

Bishwarup Bhattacharjee holds a bachelor’s degree in Statistics from the University of Calcutta. Since July 2016, he has been working as a Senior Business Analyst at VMware. He is a data scientist with cross-industry experience of 6 years. He has worked as an independent analytics consultant for several companies, such as Finomial, Upwork, Elance, TCS, etc. He has also worked as a Data Scientist for Guru.com. He has also been a Co-founder and CEO of a startup company called Alphinite Analytics for more than a year.

Achievements:

1. He secured the first rank (out of 3055 teams) in the Allstate Claims Severity Challenge (October 10, 2016 – December 12, 2016).
2. He also won the gold medal by securing the second position (out of 2926 teams) in the BNP Paribas Cardif Claim Challenge (February 3, 2016 – April 18, 2016).
3. He secured the fourth rank (of 5123 teams) for the Santander Customer Satisfaction Challenge (March 2, 2016 – May 2, 2016).

Abhishek Thakur (Current Rank: 19)

Abhishek Thakur secured his B.Tech. in Electronics Engineering from National Institute of Technology, Surat, in 2011. He then went on to the University of Bonn for his Master’s in Computer Science in 2014. He started his career as a Data Scientist with mbr targeting.

He also worked as a research assistant at the University of Paderborn for a year on Artificial Intelligent Systems and Business Intelligence. He is currently a Principal Data Scientist at ProductsUp before which had a similar role at the New Yorker. He also worked as a Senior Data Scientist for Searchmetrics, Inc. He likes to take part in ML competitions and has taken part in over 100 competitions.

His research interests include automatic machine learning, deep learning, image analysis and retrieval, hyperparameter optimization, computer vision, and pattern recognition. He has published three papers in journals such as ICML, Scandinavian Conference on Image Analysis, and International Journal of Machine Learning and Computing.

Achievements:

1. His highest world rank is 3.
2. He won a gold medal for Springleaf Marketing Response Challenge (August 14, 2015 – October 19, 2015) by securing rank 2 (out of 2226).
3. He secured rank 3 (of 321) for How Much Did It Rain? Challenge (January 9, 2015 – May 15, 2015).
4. He was ranked third (of 3514) for the Otto Group Product Classification Challenge (March 17, 2015 – May 18, 2015).

Sudalai Rajkumar (SRK) (Current Rank: 26)

Sudalai Rajkumar also known as SRK holds a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore. He took a 1-year long course on Business Analytics and Intelligence from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. SRK is the Lead Data Scientist at Freshdesk. He has got a lot of experience solving real-world business problems across different domains.

He has also worked as a Senior Data Scientist at Tiger Analytics. He has published papers at the International Conference on Biometrics (ICB) 2015. He is also one of the top solvers in the CrowdANALYTIX platform.

Achievements:

1. He won a gold medal for the “How Much Did It Rain?” challenge(January 9, 2015 – May 15, 2015) by securing rank 2(of 321).
2. He secured rank 5 (of 379) in the Grasp-and-Lift EEG Detection Challenge (June 29, 2015 – August 31, 2015).
3. He won a gold medal by securing rank 6 (of 381) in the ECML/PKDD 15: Taxi Trajectory Prediction Challenge(April 20, 2015 – July 1, 2015).
   His highest rank till date is 13.

Thakur Raj Anand (Current Rank: 45)

Thakur Raj Anand is working as a Data Scientist at DataRobot. He completed his under graduation from Delhi University in 2010. He did his post graduation from Madras School Of Economics in Applied Quantitative Finance.

He started his career as a Junior Analyst at Lucid Technology & Solutions. He has also worked as a Predictive Analyst for Quantium India and Assistant Manager for American Express.

Achievements:

1. He secured the 6th rank of 1373 teams in the Bosch Production Line Performance challenge on Kaggle.
2. He won the gold medal (rank 8th of 1764 teams) for the Homesite Quote Conversion challenge.
3. He got rank 9 out of 548 teams in the Avito Duplicate Ads Detection challenge held from May 6, 2016, to July 11, 2016.

His highest rank is 38.

Rohan Rao (Current Rank: 70)

Rohan Rao graduated from Ramnarian Ruia College with a Bachelor’s degree in Statistics in 2011 and then received his Master’s degree in Applied Statistics in 2013 from IIT Bombay. He started his career as a Data Scientist for 64 Squares where he worked for almost 2 years. From there, he went on to work with Belong.co again as a Data Scientist. He then joined AdWyze as the Lead Data Scientist in March 2016.

Apart from being a data scientist he also likes puzzles, numbers, and Sudoku. He is a four-time National Sudoku Champion. By securing 8th place, he also became the first Indian to be ranked in the Top 10 in the World in 2012.

Achievements:

1. He secured rank 5 (of 532 teams)in the See Click Predict Fix Challenge. His team consisted of Shashi Godbole and Gauss.
2. He secured rank 9 (of 974 teams) for the Telstra Network Disruptions (November 25, 2015 – February 29, 2016).
3. He secured rank 11 (of 1787 teams) for the Santander Product Recommendation Challenge.

Anupam Pandey (Current Rank: 105)

Anupam Pandey holds bachelor’s degree in Statistics from Hindu College, University of Delhi. He is currently a Data Scientist at Annik Technology Services Pvt. Ltd. He has nearly 2 years of experience in data science and analytics with machine learning, predictive modeling, time series analysis, and much more thrown in.

He is very passionate about solving business problems using machine learning techniques.

Achievements:

1. He was ranked first among 1,462 teams for the Airbnb New User Bookings Challenge.
2. He won a silver medal (rank 117 of 3307) for the Rossmann Store Sales Challenge.
3. He secured rank 275 (of 2926) in the BNP Paribas Cardif Claims Management Challenge.

His highest rank is 37.

Anil Thomas (Current Rank: 175)

Anil Thomas holds a BTech. in Computer Engineering from National Institute of Technology Karnataka Surathkal, and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

He started off his career as a Software Engineer at NCSA, Sun Microsystems, Siemens. He then worked as a Technical Leader for Cisco Systems for 16 years. Currently, he is a Principal Data Scientist at Nervana Systems where they are building a processor which is biologically inspired and would make deep neural networks more accessible.

Achievements:

1. His highest rank is 2. He has won 7 gold, 4 silver, and 9 bronze medals till date.
2. He stood first among 190 teams in the ICDAR2013 – Gender Prediction from Handwriting Challenge.
3. He secured rank 3 (out of 79 teams) for the MLSP 2013 Bird Classification Challenge.
4. He won a gold medal (rank 4 of 111) in the Algorithmic Trading Challenge.

Mathusuthan Kannan (Current Rank: 214)

He is a Data Analyst with expertise in Simulation, Data Analysis, Machine Learning, and Large-scale Distributed Processing. Here’s a list of his achievements on Kaggle.

Achievements:

1. He secured rank 29 in the Walmart Recruiting II: Sales in Stormy Weather Challenge out of 485 teams.
2. He was ranked 67th out of 1,462 teams for the Airbnb New User Bookings Challenge.
3. He won the bronze medal (rank 57 of 274 teams) for the “Truly Native?” Challenge.

His highest rank is 136.

Praveen Adepu (Current Rank: 216)

Praveen Adepu is a Business Intelligence and Analytics Consultant at Fred IT Group in Melbourne, Australia. He graduated from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in 2005 as an Engineer.

Since then, he has been into Business Intelligence (BI) starting as a BI Developer for ACT Solutions and then as a BI Analyst for Intellitex Solutions. He also worked as a BI consultant for NEC Australia and Reporting Analyst at City Holdings (AUS) Pty Ltd. He specializes in Microsoft BI technology/SQL Server Development DBA.

Achievements:

1. His team grabbed the third position among 548 teams for the Avito Duplicate Ads Detection challenge.
2. He secured rank 32 of 2271 in the Predicting Red Hat Business Value challenge.
3. He won the silver medal by securing rank 44 among 3055 teams for the Allstate Claims Severity challenge.

His highest rank has been 210.

Siddharth Chandrakant (Current Rank: 222)

Siddharth Chandrakant is a software engineer by profession and training. He has a Bachelor’s of Engineering in Information Technology degree from PESIT, Bangalore. He worked for HP Labs as a Systems Software Engineer for almost 2 years.

He then went on to pursue his Masters in Computer Science and Information Systems from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2014.

Achievements:

1. He secured rank 28 among 3055 teams and won the silver medal for the Allstate Claims Severity challenge.
2. He secured rank 55 of 2271 in the Predicting Red Hat Business Value challenge.
3. He secured rank 160 (of 1689) in the TalkingData Mobile User Demographics challenge.

His highest rank is 221.

Yashwant Reddy (Current Rank: 242)

Yashwanth Reddy graduated from the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, with a Master of Computer Applications (MCA) in 2011. He then worked as an Analyst at Citi Global Analytics & Insights.  He went from Analyst to Senior Analyst and then to Analytics Manager at Citi. He has more than 5 years of experience in multiple fields like Data Visualisation, Data Analytics, and Software development.

He is tech savvy, machine learning enthusiast. He has solved more than 40 problems on Kaggle.

Achievements:

1. His team grabbed rank 8 of 1764 for the Homesite Quote Conversion challenge.
2. He was ranked 15th out of 1,462 (won silver medal) teams for the Airbnb New User Bookings Challenge.
3. He secured rank 39 of 2926 in the BNP Paribas Cardif Claims Management Challenge.

His highest rank is 162.

Sonny Laskar (Current Rank: 245)

Sonny is a business-oriented Data Scientist and has expertise in fields such text analytics, deploying real-time Big Data analytics solutions, and machine learning. He graduated from Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpur, in the field of Mining and Mineral Engineering. He also holds an MBA degree from the Indian Institute of Management, Indore. He is working as a Senior Principal Architect, Automation & Analytics at Microland in Bangalore. He has also worked as an Assistant Consultant for Tata Consultancy Services.

Achievements:

1. He secured second position (of 548 teams) for the Avito Duplicate Ads Detection challenge.
2. He won a bronze medal for Home Depot Product Search Relevance challenge.
3. He also secured the 4th rank for the Predict fuel flow rate of Airplanes on CrowdAnalytix.

Vikram Jha (Current Rank: 252)

Vikram Jha is the Founder & CEO of Pucho which is an artificial intelligence-driven platform where users can ask questions to get answers in their languages using text or voice. He has also been a Co-Founder & CEO of the company Deep Learning Research Pvt. Ltd. which was created to participate in the world-renowned robotics challenge, “DARPA Humanoid Robotics Challenge.” He graduated from Dr.M.G.R. University with a B.Tech in the field of Electronics & Communication Engineering in 2011. He has also worked as a Software Engineer at Mphasis.

Achievements:

1. He won a silver medal (rank 9 of 75 teams) for GigaOM WordPress Challenge: Splunk Innovation Prospect challenge.
2. He bagged a silver medal for the Grockit What Do You Know? challenge by securing rank 44 of 239 teams.
3. He secured rank 26 (of 104 teams) for the Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2012 – Load Forecasting challenge.

His highest rank is 42.

Pradeep Hegde (Current Rank: 278)

Pradeep Hegde is currently the Executive Director, Equities Technology at Nomura International Ltd., Hong Kong. He takes care of all front office systems such as trading, risk management, etc. used by Equity Derivatives and Delta-1 traders in Asia. He has been working for Nomura for over 8 years now. He completed his under graduation from National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli in the field of Electronics & Communication Engineering in 1994. He started working as a Software Developer for Digital Equipment India Ltd. and then later for Citigroup, Japan. He worked at Lehman Brothers for more than 11.5 years.

Achievements:

1. He secured rank 16 (of 5123 teams) for the Santander Product Recommendation Challenge held from March 2, 2016 to May 2, 2016.
2. He won the silver medal (rank 21 of 1969) for the Grupo Bimbo Inventory Demand challenge.
3. He was ranked 68 among 3055 teams and won the silver medal for the Allstate Claims Severity challenge.

His highest rank is 277.

Sandeep Sikka (Current Rank: 317)

Sandeep Sikka graduated from IIT Bombay in 1996 and went on to pursue his post graduation (MS Computer Science) at Washington University, St. Louis. Like many other data scientists that we have seen so far, he also started off his career as a Software Engineer for Inktomi Corporation. He then became the Principal Systems Software Engineer Lead at Akamai where he worked for over 12.5 years in multiple fields like distributed data collection and processing, Linux kernel, etc. He also worked as the Principal Software Engineer at Kinvey and Lattice Engines. Currently, he is working as a Data Scientist/Independent Consultant for Whitney Solutions, L.L.C.

Achievements:

1. He participated in ICDM 2015: Drawbridge Cross-Device Connections challenge and won a silver medal for securing the 17th rank of 340 teams.
2. He was ranked 22nd of 1568 teams in the Allstate Purchase Prediction Challenge.
3. He secured rank 24 of 548 teams for the Avito Duplicate Ads Detection challenge.

His highest rank is 223.

Srikanth Iyer (Current Rank: 339)

Srikanth Iyer has been a Data Scientist at BehaviorMatrix for almost 3 years now. He has extensively worked on building event detection and prediction systems, user’s political inclination estimator in social media, state-of-the-art sarcasm detection predictive model for social media content, and other related areas. He has an undergraduate degree from Shanmugha Arts, Science, Technology, and Research Academy in Computer Science Engineering, Tamil Nadu, and a graduate degree from Indiana University, Bloomington. He has also worked as a Data-Driven Research Intern at Chief Technology Office, Motorola Solutions.

Achievements:

1. He won a silver medal (ranked 30 of 478) in the Melbourne University AES/MathWorks/NIH Seizure Prediction Challenge held from September 2, 2016, to December 1, 2016.
2. Srikanth also won a silver medal (ranked 151 of 5123) for Santander Customer Satisfaction Challenge held from March 2, 2016, to May 2, 2016.
3. He grabbed the Bronze medal (rank 54 of 673) for another Kaggle challenge called Flavours of Physics: Finding ? ? ???.

Shashishekhar Godbole (Current Rank: 449)

Shashishekhar Godbole graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, with a Master of Technology degree in Mechanical Engineering. He began to work as an Analyst for Fractal Analytics in August 2006 and got promoted to Senior Analyst, Project Lead, Project Manager, and, finally, to Associate Director in November 2011. Currently, he is the Co-founder and Data Scientist at 64 Squares in Pune, India.

Achievements:

1. Shashishekhar won the gold medal (rank 3 of 146) in the “Practice Fusion Diabetes Classification” challenge held from July 10, 2012, to September 10, 2012.
2. He also won the gold medal (rank 3 of 475) for the challenge called “Blue Book for Bulldozers” where users had to predict the auction sale price “blue book” for bulldozers.
3. He won another gold medal (rank 5 of 532) in “See Click Predict Fix” challenge for predicting which 311 issues are most important to citizens. The challenge was conducted from September 29, 2013 to November 22, 2013.

His highest rank is 18.