Dr. Avishek Pal, PhD, is a software engineer, data scientist, author, and an avid Kaggler living in Hyderabad, the City of Nawabs, India. He has a bachelor of technology degree in industrial engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur and has earned his doctorate in 2015 from University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom. At Warwick, he studied at the prestigious Warwick Manufacturing Centre, which functions as one of the centers of excellence in manufacturing and industrial engineering research and teaching in UK.
In terms of work experience, Avishek has a diversified background. He started his career as a software engineer at IBM India to develop middleware solutions for telecom clients. This was followed by stints at a start-up product development company followed by Ericsson, a global telecom giant. During these three years, Avishek lived his passion for developing software solutions for industrial problems using Java and different database technologies.
Avishek always had an inclination for research and decided to pursue his doctorate after spending three years in software development. Back in 2011, the time was perfect as the analytics industry was getting bigger and data science was emerging as a profession. Warwick gave Avishek ample time to build up the knowledge and hands-on practice on statistical modeling and machine learning. He applied these not only in doctoral research, but also found a passion for solving data science problems on Kaggle.
After doctoral studies, Avishek started his career in India as a lead machine learning engineer for a leading US-based investment company. He is currently working at Microsoft as a senior data scientist and enjoys applying machine learning to generate revenue and save costs for the software giant.
Avishek has published several research papers in reputed international conferences and journals. Reflecting back on his career, he feels that starting as a software developer and then transforming into a data scientist gives him the end-to-end focus of developing statistics into consumable software solutions for industrial stakeholders.
I would like to thank my wife for putting up with my late-night writing sessions and weekends when I had to work on this book instead of going out. Thanks also goes to Prakash, the co-author of this book, for encouraging me to write a book. I would also like to thank my mentors with whom I have interacted over the years. People such as Prof. Manoj Kumar Tiwari from IIT Kharagpur and Prof. Darek Ceglarek, my doctoral advisor at Warwick, have taught me and showed me the right things to do, both academically and career-wise.
Dr. PKS Prakash is a data scientist and author. He has spent the last 12 years in developing many data science solutions in several practice areas within the domains of healthcare, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, and e-commerce. He is working as the data science manager at ZS Associates. ZS is one of the world's largest business services firms, helping clients with commercial success by creating data-driven strategies using advanced analytics that they can implement within their sales and marketing operations in order to make them more competitive, and by helping them deliver an impact where it matters.
Prakash's background involves a PhD in industrial and system engineering from Wisconsin-Madison, US. He has earned his second PhD in engineering from University of Warwick, UK. His other educational qualifications involve a masters from University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, and bachelors from National Institute of Foundry and Forge Technology (NIFFT), India. He is the co-founder of Warwick Analytics spin-off from University of Warwick, UK.
Prakash has published articles widely in research areas of operational research and management, soft computing tools, and advance algorithms in leading journals such as IEEE-Trans, EJOR, and IJPR among others. He has edited an issue on Intelligent Approaches to Complex Systems and contributed in books such as Evolutionary Computing in Advanced Manufacturing published by WILEY and Algorithms and Data Structures using R and R Deep Learning Cookbook published by PACKT.
I would like to thank my wife, Dr. Ritika Singh, and daughter, Nishidha Singh, for all their love and support. I would also like to thank Aman Singh (Acquisition Editor) of this book and the entire PACKT team whose names may not all be enumerated but their contribution is sincerely appreciated and gratefully acknowledged.