Published on 31, Jul 2023

Behind the Scenes With Vijayasarathi Balasubramanian, Driven Data Scientist and Optimistic Futurist

Artificial technology has grown in ways many of us couldn’t have imagined. Once the musings of action packed science fiction stories, the technology has made a prominent stance in several industries such as finance, retail, healthcare, and transportation. AI has helped experts take long strides in their fields and is constantly being refined thanks in part to the efforts of engineers, developers, and data scientists like Vijayasarathi Balasubramanian.

Vijayasarathi Balasubramanian, also known as “Vijay”, keeps tabs on the rapid changes in his industry. Not just so he can learn how to best use the rapidly developing technology, but also so that he can teach others how to best use and integrate AI into their own systems. About AI, he has this to say,

“It’s difficult to impart exactly how ‘big’ big data is these days,” Vijay says. “We’re dealing with enormous volumes of data by the day, by the hour, by the second, and it’s gotten to a point where we can no longer manually process and compute all of the information we get. AI has come so far that it both makes jobs for humans more palatable, but it’s specialized so that different industries can get the greatest benefit.”

Vijay made his first strides in the technological space back in 2006 when distributed computing was still a topic of discussion. He was one of the forerunners implementing this technology to organize and create insights from multi-terabyte unstructured data for British Telecom, the largest Telecom provider in the UK. 

These British Telecom assignments piqued his interest for data science, and so Vijay enrolled for Masters in Data Science at the University of Notre Dame. The algorithms and techniques he learned in Notre Dame helped him create enterprise scale data products and apply advanced machine learning to solve real world problems.

After moving to the United States, his career continued to advance. He refined his craft in the retail and telecom domains where he gained expertise in developing advanced data science solutions in multi-cloud environments, creating state-of-the-art machine learning models, and deriving key insights from big data. Such key insights include breaking down customer information into demographic, geographic location, and product or service popularity. He uses these insights to hone various machine learning technology, such as the ones behind product recommendation algorithms. Now, he’s using his decades’ long experience to help large corporations use machine learning at scale.

Vijay has since joined the ranks of Microsoft where he currently works as a Senior Data and Applied Scientist. He also actively mentors AI/ML startup founders and data science professionals across various platforms. Vijay labels himself as an ardent reader and is an enthusiastic contributor to the scholastic community. He spread his knowledge in the data science space by mentoring budding data scientists and is active among technical organizations including IEEE, IET, and BCS.

“I’m looking forward to the future, both in regards to data science and my own. I’ve been in this field for almost twenty years, but I still feel like I’m just getting started. As I said, the world is constantly growing, so there’s so much unexplored potential out there. I have big plans for what I want to do next, but I’m very happy doing what I’m doing right now.”

Vijayasarathi Balasubramanian has seventeen years of professional experience in data science, where he specialized in the telecom and e-commerce fields. Currently, he works at a leading cloud solution provider as a Senior Data and Applied Scientist at Microsoft.

To learn about Vijay or to learn more about his thoughts on data science, connect with him on his website.