Srinivas Duvvuri is currently Senior Vice President Development, heading the development teams for Fixed Income Suite of products at Broadridge Financial Solutions (India) Pvt Ltd. In addition, he also leads the Big Data and Data Science COE and is the principal member of the Broadridge India Technology Council. He is self learnt Data Scientist. The Big Data /Data Science COE in the past 3 years, has successfully completed multiple POC’s and some of the use cases are moving towards production deployment. He has over 25+ years of experience in software product development. His experience spans predominantly in product development in, multiple domains Financial Services, Infrastructure Management, OLAP, Telecom Billing and Customer Care, CAD/CAM. Prior to Broadridge, he’s held leadership positions at a Startup and leading IT majors such as CA, Hyperion (Oracle), Globalstar. He has a patent in Relational OLAP.

Srinivas loves to teach and mentor budding Engineers. He has established strong Academic connect and interacts with a host of educational institutions, He is an active speaker in various conferences, summits and meetups on topics such as Big data, Data Science

Srinivas is a B.Tech in Aeronautical Engineering and M.Tech in Computer Science, from IIT, Madras.

At the outset I would like to thank VLK our MD and Broadridge India for supporting me in this endeavor. I would like to thank my parents, teachers, colleagues and extended family who have mentored and motivated me. My thanks to Bikram who agreed me to be the co-author when proposal to author the book came up. My special thanks to my wife Ratna, sons Girish and Aravind who have supported me in completing this book.

I would also like to sincerely thank the editorial team from Packt Arshriya, Rashmi, Deepti and all those, though not mentioned here, who have contributed in this project. Finally last but not the least our publisher Packt.

Bikramaditya Singhal is a data scientist with about 7 years of industry experience. He is an expert in statistical analysis, predictive analytics, machine learning, Bitcoin, Blockchain, and programming in C, R, and Python. He has extensive experience in building scalable data analytics solutions in many industry sectors. He also has an active interest on industrial IoT, machine to machine communication, decentralized computation through Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence.

Bikram currently leads the data science team of ‘Digital Enterprise Solutions’ group at Tech Mahindra Ltd. He also worked in companies such as Microsoft India, Broadridge, Chelsio Communications and also cofounded a company named ‘Mund Consulting’ which focused on Big Data analytics.

Bikram is an active speaker in various conferences, summits and meetups on topics such as big data, data science, IIoT and Blockchain.

I would like to thank my father, my brothers Manoj Agrawal and Sumit Mund for their mentorship. Without learning from them, there is not a chance I could be doing what I do today, and it is because of them and others that I feel compelled to pass my knowledge on to those willing to learn. Special thanks to my mentor and coauthor Srinivas Duvvuri, and my friend Priyansu Panda, without their efforts this book quite possibly would not have happened.

My deepest gratitude to his holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar for building me to what I am today. Many thanks and gratitude to my parents and my wife Yashoda for their unconditional love and support.

I would also like to sincerely thank all those, though not mentioned here, who have contributed in this project directly or indirectly.