The big data stars: 4 Indians among Fortune's list of 'extraordinary' tech czars

Four Indians are among Fortune magazine’s list of 20 “extraordinary” technology czars and young entrepreneurs analysing data and processing big numbers to discover information that will “transform the way businesses operate.”

Fortune’s maiden ‘Big Data All-Stars’ lists the 20 extraordinary people who are “the best at connecting the dots and digging deep.”

[caption id=“attachment_75464” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image: Reuters[/caption]

Among the 20 is Arun Murthy, who co-founded business computer software company Hortonworks.

Murthy started off at Yahoo when Hadoop, the open-source storage and processing software that powers much of the web’s big data, was an early prototype.

His team’s mission was to scale it for Yahoo’s web search and Murthy helped develop a resource and workload management system called YARN that acts as a sort of operating system for Hadoop, Fortune said.

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Next on the list is Surabhi Gupta, a software engineer at popular travel rentals website Airbnb.

As a graduate student in computer science at Stanford University, Gupta became fascinated by the art of summarisation, which is extracting meaning from text without actually reading the text.

Gupta was working at Google when she started researching a trip using Airbnb.

The possibilities Airbnb’s data offered fascinated her and in the four months at the room rental service company, overhauled and improved their search engines and is currently working on condensing all of Airbnb’s listings to create summaries to enable users to understand different cities’ vibes, the publication said.

Also on the list is Swatee Singh, Vice President of GMS IM Platforms and Big Data Capabilities at American Express, where her focus is to make “business personal.”

She is the brains behind American Express ‘MyOffers’ which aims to give members “what they want when they need it.”

She is also responsible for a tool that allows merchants to compare their annual performance.

Next on the list is Vijay Subramanian, Chief Analytics Officer at Rent the Runway, an online service that provides designer dress and accessory rentals.

Subramanian built a model to estimate missed demand, product longevity, and occasion usage for the company’s inventory- a huge cost-saver for a company that buys truckloads of dresses and accessories from fashion designers every season to rent to customers.

His next mission is to incorporate new types of data from Unlimited, the company’s major new expansion into everyday wear, Fortune said.

PTI