Ramasubramanian (Ramsu) Sundararajan heads the AI function at Cartesian Consulting. He started his journey as a researcher at the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on theoretical and algorithmic aspects of learning with a reject option. Prior to this, he earned his undergraduate degree from the Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani.
Since 2003, he has worked at GE’s Global Research division as well as at Sabre Airline Solutions’ Operations Research group, where he built statistical and machine learning models to find patterns in a variety of data sources in different domains. Examples include: patterns in the behaviour of retail banking customers that would indicate their future profitability or risk; patterns in medical image data that would provide early warning for diseases such as breast cancer and pneumoconiosis; patterns in sensor data that would help service engineers flag underperformance or impending failures in steam and gas turbines; and patterns in traveller behaviour that would help airlines determine trip purpose, ancillary purchase behaviour and so on. In his current role at Cartesian, he hopes to extend his hunt for interesting and actionable patterns to newer domains.
Through it all, Ramsu has maintained a focus on both business value and innovation. His work on retail banking, for instance, led to over $20 in incremental profits and was a finalist for the Daniel H Wagner Prize for excellence in OR practice. He has co-authored over 20 publications in international conferences and journals, notably Interfaces, Journal of the Operational Research Society and the Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management. A firm believer in the “if you want to learn, teach” doctrine, he has regularly offered internal training programs and delivered guest lectures at premier educational institutes such as the IIMs and IITs on applied machine learning.
Ramsu is married, has one daughter, and lives in Bangalore.