Nitendra Rajput works as Vice President and Head of AI Garage Center in India at Mastercard where he defines and leads the data science and machine learning work for all divisions of Mastercard such as IT, sales, marketing, HR and many others including the transactions related data for Mastercard. Before joining Mastercard in June 2019, Nitendra spent two years heading the Data Science team of Info Edge as an Executive Vice President where his work spanned different businesses of Info Edge (naukri, jeevansathi, 99acres), powering large-scale, real-time applications in recruitment, dating and real-estate online portals. Prior to this, Nitendra was at IBM Research for 18 years, managing the mobile and AI agenda for IBM Research in India.
With over 20 years of experience, Nitendra is considered to be an expert in the area of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Mobile Interactions, having authored over 80 publications at top international ACM and IEEE venues, owing to which he has been recognized as an ACM Distinguished Scientist, ACM Distinguished Speaker (2015) and a senior IEEE Member. He has delivered several tutorials and conducted workshops in AI and speech areas at top ACM venues (MobileHCI, IUI, CSCW, CHI). With over 50 granted patents to his name, Nitendra was an IBM Master Inventor and was also an IBM Academy of Technology member. In 2012, he coauthored a book titled "Speech in Mobile and Pervasive Environments" that was published by John Wiley & Sons.
At Mastercard, he works on applying deep learning algorithms such as LSTM, CNN, AutoEncoders, GBMs and GAN along with conventional machine learning algorithms such as decision trees, SVMs and HMMs to solve business problems around recommender systems, anomaly detection, time-series modeling, spam detection, question-answering systems, auto-suggestors and process-automation. His role is to work with the business divisions to identify ML/AI opportunities in the organisation, define technical solutions, work with his team to build state-of-the-art solutions and work with the engineering team to have the algorithms deployed in real environments.
Recent Faculty Collaborations:
Prof. Alex Pentland, MIT (in the area of machine learning for COVID related use-cases)
Prof. Srikanta Bedathur, IIT Delhi (in the area of graphs representation learning for transaction data applications)
Prof. Mausam, IIT Delhi (in the area of information extraction from unstructured text)
Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, IIIT Delhi (in the area of spam detection in online social platforms)
Recent Professional Activities:
ACM Distinguished Scientist
IEEE Senior Member
Industry co-chair for CODS-COMAD
Program Committee member for AAAI 2020, ACL 2020, Interspeech 2020, NAACL 2019, EMNLP 2019, InterSpeech 2019 and many other conferences
Associate Editor for EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech and Music Processing.
Recent Talks:
Interviewed at IdeaXme 2020.
Keynote speech at Teens in AI Accelerator Program 2020.
Panelist at The Commonwealth: Advancing towards future with Emerging Technologies & AI 2020.
Invited speaker at Mastercard Virtual Cyber & Risk Summit 2020.
Invited Speaker at Inflection Conference 2019.
Invited speaker at Tech Triveni 2019.
Invited Industry Talk at CODS/Comad 2019.
Invited speaker at Tech Triveni 2018.
Keynote speaker at Future of Analytics Summit 2018.
Invited Speaker at Futurist Business Conclave 2018.
Invited Speaker at NVIDIA Developerconnect 2018.
Recent Publications:
Nausheen Fatma, Niharika Sachdeva, Nitendra Rajput, "Canonicalizing Organization Names for Recruitment Domain," ACM IKDD Conference on Data Science, 2020.
Ankit Saw , Nitendra Rajput, "Beauty lies in the face of the beholder: A Bi-channel CNN architecture for attractiveness modeling in matrimony," IEEE/ACM ASONAM 2019.
Nidhi Goyal, Niharika Sachdeva, Vijay Chaudhary, Rijula Kar, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Nitendra Rajput, "Con2KG: A Large-scale Domain-Specific Knowledge Graph," ACM Hypertext 2019.
Sumita Sharma, Blessin Varkey, Krishnaveni Achary, Jaakko Hakulinen, Markku Turunen, Tomi Heimonen, Saurabh Srivastava, Nitendra Rajput, "Designing Gesture-Based Applications for Individuals with Developmental Disabilities: Guidelines from User Studies in India," ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS), Volume 11, 2018.
Deepak Akkil, Prasenjit Dey, Nitendra Rajput, "Little Bear–A Gaze Aware Learning Companion for Early Childhood Learners," Interact 2017.
Deepak Akkil, Prasenjit Dey, Deepshika Salian, Nitendra Rajput, "Gaze awareness in agent-based early-childhood learning application." Interact 2017.
Aanand Nayyar, Utkarsh Dwivedi, Karan Ahuja, Nitendra Rajput, Seema Nagar, Kuntal Dey, "OptiDwell: Intelligent Adjustment of Dwell Click Time," ACM IUI 2017.
U Dwivedi, N Rajput, P Dey, B Varkey, "VisualMath: An Automated Visualization System for Understanding Math Word-Problems," ACM IUI 2017.
Sumita Sharma, Saurabh Srivastava, Krishnaveni Achary, Blessin Varkey, Tomi Heimonen, Jaakko Samuli Hakulinen, Markku Turunen, Nitendra Rajput, "Promoting Joint Attention with Computer Supported Collaboration in Children with Autism," ACM CSCW 2016.
(full list of publications is at google-scholar)
Social Links:
Other Interests:
Ironman 70.3 Finisher
Certified Advanced Meditation Teacher
Blindfolded Rubik's Cube Solver
Trinity Grade 3 Guitar Player