Sharan Kumar Ravindran is a lead data scientist in the fastest growing big data start-up based in Bangalore. His primary interests lie in statistics and machine learning. He has over 4 years of experience and has worked in the domains of e-commerce and IoT.
He has solved several problems on Kaggle and is among the top 10 percent of experts on Kaggle. His blog and social profiles can be found at www.rsharankumar.com.
He works for Flutura, which is ranked among the top 20 most promising big data companies across the globe by the leading analyst magazine, CIO Review. Flutura also featured on Gigaom reports on big data and M2M in the energy sector. Flutura was also the winner at TechSparks, where 800 innovative start-ups were evaluated.
Kannan Kalidasan is a software developer by profession, an autodidact, and open source evangelist. He has a decade's experience in database computing, data management, open source, and distributed computing. He holds a bachelor's of technology degree in computer science from Pondicherry University. He has played different roles in his career, such as a developer, an architect, a team lead, and a DBA. He currently holds the position of a BI Engineer at Orbitz Worldwide.
He started his own start-up back in 2005 on a part-time basis during his college days, worked with other companies in different open source projects, and provided training. He is passionate about technology and an entrepreneur at heart, and he likes to mentor fellow enthusiasts. His inherent curiosity keeps him occupied with learning new technologies and trying new things. He always believes that "our dreams can be delayed but will never fail if we work hard."
He blogs at www.kannandreams.wordpress.com and you can follow him on Twitter at @kannanpoem. He loves to take long walks alone, write Tamil poems, paint, and read books.
Erik M. Rodríguez Pacheco works as a manager in the Business Intelligence Unit at Banco Improsa in San José, Costa Rica. He has 11 years of experience in the financial industry. He is currently a professor of the Business Intelligence Specialization Program at the Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica's Continuing Education Program. Erik is an enthusiast of new technologies, particularly those related to business intelligence, data mining, and data science. He holds a Bachelor's degree in business administration from Universidad de Costa Rica, and has specialized in business intelligence from the Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica, data mining from Promidat (Programa Iberoamericano de Formación en Minería de Datos), and business intelligence and data mining from Universidad del Bosque, Colombia. He is currently enrolled in a specialization program in data science from Johns Hopkins University. He can be reached at cr.linkedin.com/in/erikrodriguez.
Arun Padmanabhan has about 4 years of experience in developing products including mobile, enterprise, statistical, and data mining applications. He graduated with a master's degree in computer applications in 2010. Currently, he is a data scientist at Flutura Decision Science and Analytics, where he is working at saving the world, one data product at a time.
Juan Pablo Zamora holds a bachelor's degree in statistics from the University of Costa Rica (UCR) in 2007. He is currently working on his dissertation in the field of predictive analytics and will obtain an MSc degree in statistics from the University of Costa Rica.
He enjoys teaching and was a tutor of statistics courses at the Business School of UNED of Costa Rica during 2010-2012. He also mentored others in the areas of data processing and analytics as well as the use of statistical analysis tools, to name a few.
Juan has over 7 years of experience in the banking industry, primarily in the credit card business for Central America and Mexico. He began as an analyst, eventually becoming the leader of a team of analysts for Central America's largest credit card issuer and acquirer. During this period, he participated in several predictive analytics projects related to credit risk, account retention, and profitability.
Juan recently joined a large multinational company in the retail sector with the task of building an analytics program to identify and prevent high-risk issues and/or threats to the business in Latin America.
His current interests are R, data visualization, business intelligence, predictive modeling, and big data. He can be reached at cr.linkedin.com/in/datasciencezamora or data.<[email protected]>.
Patric Zhao is a senior GPU architect in the High Performance Computing (HPC) field at Nvidia. He has experience in developing scientific and engineering applications and focuses on parallelization, performance modeling, and architecture-specific tuning. Patric is currently working on big data and machine learning areas, including regression, neural network, recommending system design, and implementation in CPU and GPU architectures. Patric has also contributed to accelerate R's applications by CUDA in the GPU ecosystem. You can find related articles on Nvidia's blog at http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/author/patricz/ or write to him at <[email protected]>.