Nitendra Rajput

Nitendra is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and an IEEE Senior Member. In his current role at Mastercard, he is leads the AI Garage centre in India that works on solving ML problems for the Financial world. Problems that currently interest him are in the area of anomaly detection, time-series modelling, information extraction, information representation, scalable machine learning and temporal graph networks. Do reach out in case these problems interest you as this centre is definitely expanding. If you love to solve diverse and complex business problems using machine learning and are passionate about learning, innovating and pushing the boundaries for AI, then this is the place. Earlier he spent 18 years at IBM Research, working on different aspects of machine learning, HCI, software engineering and mobile sensing. He then spent 2.5 years at InfoEdge as EVP and Head of Analytics from 2017 to 2019. In this role, he established and managed the AI portfolio for the different business verticals of InfoEdge (Naukri, 99acres, Jeevansathi, NaukriGulf, Shiksha). Specifically, his department focussed on solving problems in the machine learning and NLP domain to develop recommendation and search systems. Nitendra has delivered several tutorials and conducted workshops in the mobile and speech areas at top ACM venues (MobileHCI, IUI, CSCW, CHI). Technically, he had worked on problems related to HCI, signal processing, recommender systems and multimodal search. He has over 50 granted patents and over 100 publications in top conferences such as EMNLP, CHI, CSCW, CIKM, IUI, IEEE Multimedia, ICASSP and others. He serves on the program committee of several conferences including CIKM, AAAI, EMNLP, Interspeech and ICAIF. In 2012, he authored a book with Amit Anil Nanavati titled "Speech in Mobile and Pervasive Environments" that was published by John Wiley & Sons. In 2021, he was recognized with the Technical Role Model in AI award at Zinnov Awards. In 2022, he was recognized as an ACM Distinguished Speaker and also as Top AI Leader by Analytics India Magazine. Nitendra is also an Ironman finisher, a grade-3 Trinity guitar player, blind-folded Rubik’s cube solver and an advanced meditation practitioner and teacher.