Ola appoints Badri Raghavan as chief data scientist

Cab aggregation service provider Ola on Thursday said it has appointed Badri Raghavan as Chief Data Scientist.

With over 20 years of extensive domain experience, Raghavan will lead Ola's data science team that works on technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, decision analysis, pattern recognition and related areas.

"This team will work across various business units and departments, to gain operational and business efficiencies, ranging from demand and supply prediction, driver behaviour and performance management, location Intelligence, to name a few," Ola said in a statement.

"Ola is moving on a much larger scale towards building technology based on deep insight into the Indian psyche, and for this, Big Data is a must," Ola CTO and co-founder Ankit Bhati said.

With over a million trips on the platform every day, an enormous amount of data is available to utilise intelligently and Badri's background and expertise will help in the endeavour, he added.

Prior to Ola, Badri was the Chief Data Scientist and Founding CTO of FirstFuel Software, an energy and utilities analytics firm based in Boston.

He has also been associated with IBM Research in New York and data analytics firm FICO.