Published on 28, Jun 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. The technology has helped experts take long strides in their fields, and with engineers, developers, and data scientists, AI will become a better version of itself with each passing day.

Data scientists like Vijayasarathi Balasubramanian, also known as “Vijay”, keep their eyes on the space to learn how to best use the rapidly developing technology but also to teach others how to best use and integrate AI into their own systems. 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.

“Artificial intelligence is rife with potential. There are many different branches to it, making it more complicated and more multifaceted than how it may sound in casual discussion. I believe the problem is with how it’s being marketed and used. Yes, there are programs being developed to specifically undermine creative aspirations, but I think that drowns out the whole of what AI can do and has done in different industries.”

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. To spread his knowledge in the data science space and to inspire budding scientists in this field, he actively writes blogs on LinkedIn. He is also associated with technical organizations including IEEE, IET, and BCS.

“I’m looking forward to the future, both in regards to data science and my own. I feel like I’m still getting started, and I have big plans for what I want to do next. For now, though, I’m very happy doing what I’m doing right now.”

Vijayasarathi Balasubramanian has almost twenty years of experience working in the technical field, where he specialized in the telecom and retail fields. Currently, he works at a top 50 Fortune 500 company as a Senior Data and Applied Scientist.

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