Santanu Bhattacharya (data scientist)
Santanu Bhattacharya | |
|---|---|
| Born | |
| Citizenship | American |
| Alma mater | IIT Bombay MIT Sloan NASA Goddard Space Flight Center University of Maryland |
| Occupation(s) | Scientist at Camera Culture Group MIT Media Lab Visiting professor at Indian Institute of Science |
Santanu Bhattacharya is an American data scientist. He is a scientist at the Camera Culture Group, MIT Media Lab.[1] and a visiting professor at Indian Institute of Science.[2] He is a serial entrepreneur and has worked for NASA and Facebook in the past.[3]
Early life
[edit]Santanu was born in the remote sub-Himalayan part of Northeast India.[4] After graduating high-school, he studied at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay before moving to the United States for graduate school.[5]
Career
[edit]Santanu received his PhD from University of Maryland, College Park and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center where he published several papers on a new class of superconducting infrared detectors.[6][7]
Following the academic experience, Santanu pursued an entrepreneurial path in data and automation at OriginLab. Santanu then led LIMS product development at Beckman Instruments and AT Kearney to pursue management consulting with several marquee clients such as Gillette, Pepsi, BMW and Goldman Sachs.[8]
In 2004 he joined AOL-Time Warner, then a leading internet company where the B2C internet users spend most time every day. Santanu led the creation of the Analytics Solution Centre, a global team of over 200 data scientists, online advertising experts and engineers who build foundational technologies around AOL’s contextual and behavioural advertising targeting platforms.[9][10]
In 2008, Santanu started Salorix, a Silicon Valley–based startup, to build an AI platform to help global brands find the social media updates that are worth responding to, a "needle in a haystack" problem.[11] Salorix’s flagship product Amplfy enabled global brands to monetize social media campaigns by analyzing real-time social conversations and ranking the most effective engaging audience.[12]
In 2014, he joined Facebook where he led Emerging Market Products functions that used data-driven technology to build new products for emerging user growth.[13]
From 2015 to 2017, Santanu served as Senior Vice President, Technology and Products at Delhivery India’s largest third-party eCommerce logistics that went IPO in 2022.[14][15][16] In 2018, he was appointed as the Chief Data Scientist of Airtel, world’s second largest telco with 450 million subscribers in 18 countries.[17][18][19][20]
"India Class" data problems
[edit]At the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, Santanu talked about his philosophy of solving "India Class" data problems that serve as a template for the rest of the world.[21] According to his talks and writings on the topic, "India Class" problems are defined as being at the crossroad of exploding amount of private data (unstructured, incomplete, incorrect), nascent consumer behaviour with "switchers" who exchange or try out others phones, apps, expectations for software or services being free and relatively limited amount of public data on addresses, population, migration, income etc.[1][22]
COVID-19 and data science
[edit]The rapid growth of COVID-19 led to an unprecedented response globally. Santanu was appointed as a member of the COVID-19 Mobility Data Network at Harvard University to "provide daily updates to decision-makers at the state and local levels on how well social distancing interventions are working." The team consisted of infectious disease epidemiologists and scientists working in partnership with tech companies to use aggregated mobility data in support of the COVID-19 response.[23]
Networked Agents and Decentralized AI (NANDA)
[edit]In addition, Santanu is currently working on Agentic AI and Project Nanda[24]. NANDA is a large-scale research project conceived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to construct the underlying infrastructure of a completely decentralized network of self-governing AI agents[25]. Technically, NANDA is based on the work that protocols like Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Google's Agent-to-Agent (A2A) framework have established. Its design incorporates a decentralized registry infrastructure that is a type of DNS for AI agents, enabling them to be found within dispersed environments. Agent communication is regulated through sophisticated agent-to-agent protocols that enable real-time discovery, and the sharing of knowledge within intricate networks [26].
Large Population Models
[edit]Santanu is working on Large Population Models. These are complex AI-Powered simulations that can replicate the behavior as well as interactions between large-scale populations. They can combine real-world multi-scale data to execute the simulations at high speed. It can also distribute computation over personal devices for real-time feedback which in turn also preserves privacy. Built at MIT Media Lab, LPMs allows for the prediction of systemic risks and actionable insights across diverse domains such as pandemic response, food security, and climate resilience[27].
Project Iceberg
[edit]Santanu is collaborating on Project Iceberg which is a research effort initiated in 2024 to estimate and dissect the economic effects of agentic artificial intelligence (AI), specifically within the context of the new Model Context Protocol (MCP). The project formally introduces the Iceberg Index, the very first quantitative measure proposed to ascertain economic vulnerability to AI automatability supported by MCP-assisted systems[28]. The project is organized around three anchoring pillars-capture, analyze and compute. Researchers charted more than 171 million employees and 32,000+ individual skills, across 923 occupations that account for about $9.4 trillion worth of annual labor value. Along with it, tracking of more than 13,000 MCP servers in real-time using MIT's NANDA Registry was done. Creation of custom algorithms to match MCP server abilities with occupations and skill sets was then completed and functional overlap between AI agents and human job demand was evaluated[29].
References
[edit]- ^ a b "Economic Impact of Discoverability of Localities and Addresses in India". Emerging Worlds. Retrieved 2 January 2021.
- ^ "Visiting Professors – Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber-Physical Systems @ IISc Bangalore". Retrieved 19 October 2020.
- ^ "Airtel hires former Facebook & Delhivery exec Santanu Bhattacharya as chief data scientist". The Economic Times. Retrieved 17 October 2020.
- ^ Fok, Evelyn. "Delhivery will eventually be a data company with significant business in logistics: Santanu Bhattacharya". The Economic Times. Retrieved 2 January 2021.
- ^ "Airtel eyes AI and Machine Learning: Appoints Santanu Bhattacharya as Chief Data Scientist". Tech Observer. 5 April 2018. Retrieved 2 January 2021.
- ^ "Santanu Bhattacharya Google Scholar". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 21 October 2020.
- ^ Bhattacharya, Santanu (1994). Low Frequency Optical Response in High-Temperature Superconductors (Thesis). Bibcode:1994PhDT.......203B.
- ^ "VC-backed social media marketing and analytics startup Salorix shuts up shop". VCCircle. 4 March 2014. Retrieved 2 January 2021.
- ^ "Santanu Bhattacharya's schedule for NPC 2017". npc2017.sched.com. Retrieved 2 January 2021.
- ^ Ribeiro, John (2 April 2004). "AOL sets up software center in India". InfoWorld. Retrieved 25 October 2020.
- ^ "Social Media Marketing Startup Salorix Lands $3.5M Series A". TechCrunch. 14 November 2011. Retrieved 17 October 2020.
- ^ "Salorix Launches Amplfy 2.0 To Help Brands Find The Most Relevant Social Media Conversations". TechCrunch. 14 December 2012. Retrieved 17 October 2020.
- ^ Marshall, Jack (2 July 2014). "Facebook's New Ad Effort Focuses on Emerging Markets". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 17 October 2020.
- ^ Fok, Evelyn. "Delhivery hires Facebook's Santanu Bhattacharya as data sciences head". The Economic Times. Retrieved 17 October 2020.
- ^ Bureau, Indiaretailing (24 August 2015). "Delhivery prepares for festive season rush with data analytics, AI". Indiaretailing.com. Retrieved 17 October 2020.
{{cite web}}:|last=has generic name (help) - ^ "En Inde, le cauchemar du dernier kilomètre". Le Monde.fr (in French). 7 October 2016. Retrieved 17 October 2020.
- ^ IANS (5 April 2018). "Airtel appoints Santanu Bhattacharya as its Chief Data Scientist". Business Standard India. Retrieved 21 October 2020.
- ^ "Airtel Appoints Santanu Bhattacharya as Chief Data Scientist". News18. 5 April 2018. Retrieved 21 October 2020.
- ^ Hebbar, Prajakta (5 April 2018). "Former NASA Executive Santanu Bhattacharya To Join Bharti Airtel As Chief Data Scientist". Analytics India Magazine. Retrieved 21 October 2020.
- ^ "Airtel appoints ex-NASA exec Santanu Bhattacharya to lead digital-innovation lab". in.news.yahoo.com. Retrieved 4 December 2020.
- ^ "Transformative Tech in the Emerging World | Santanu Bhattacharya | Davos 2020". YouTube.
- ^ Bhattacharya, Dr Santanu (13 October 2020). "Powering the World with "India Class" Technologies". Medium. Retrieved 16 November 2020.
- ^ "Announcing the COVID-19 Mobility Data Network • The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute". The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute. 26 March 2020. Retrieved 16 January 2021.
- ^ "NANDA Team - MIT Decentralized AI". nanda.media.mit.edu. Retrieved 29 July 2025.
- ^ Werner, John. "Make A Decentralized Internet With AI: NANDA Is Coming". Forbes. Retrieved 29 July 2025.
- ^ Werner, John. "They're Making TCP/IP For AI, And It's Called NANDA". Forbes. Retrieved 29 July 2025.
- ^ "Project Overview ‹ Large Population Models". MIT Media Lab. Retrieved 30 July 2025.
- ^ "MCP has Arrived. Are You Ready for the Revolution?". iceberg.mit.edu. Retrieved 30 July 2025.
- ^ "Project Iceberg - Methodology". iceberg.mit.edu. Retrieved 30 July 2025.