More on the team

Chid Apte uses his expertise in advanced analytics techniques to help clients extract business intelligence from mountains of data.

The vast amounts of data collected each day in corporate databases present a significant business opportunity, but only if the data can be transformed into usable business intelligence. At IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center, Senior Manager Chidanand Apte is applying his expertise in statistics, machine learning and data mining to business analytics. Chid’s interest in advanced analytics dates back to the early 1990s, when he was dealing with scalability and maintenance issues that arose in connection with manually authored knowledge-based systems: “I realized then that leveraging business data repositories to automatically generate business insights using learning techniques was the way to go.”

Chid began his tenure at IBM in 1984, following the completion of his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Rutgers University and a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology. Since 2004, Chid has served as senior manager of Watson’s Data Analytics Center, where he enjoys the challenge of helping businesses solve technical problems through leading-edge machine learning, statistical modeling and high performance computational techniques. “Businesses are grappling with making sense of their data and the desire to maximize their return on investments in information management,” says Chid. “We can help clients achieve this objective by using analytics methods to leverage their institutional data and help optimize their business decision making capabilities.”

Chid’s work at the Data Analytics Center has universal application: “Initially, it was just retail and financial services. However, today all industries and sectors are benefiting from advanced analytics. In the future, I expect healthcare and government to be significantly involved in using their data for better decision making and improved process management.”

Chid manages a talented team of research managers with a diverse set of skills, expertise and interests, including risk management, pricing and revenue optimization, after-sales service management, market analysis and predictive modeling. He says he takes satisfaction from knowing his efforts help businesses in a very practical way. “Our work at the Data Analytics Center has resulted in innovations in core statistics and machine learning driven by actual real-world business problems,” he says. “We are using our extensive high-performance computing and information management expertise to achieve industry-leading scalability, automation and robustness in our data analytics capabilities

In addition to his work at IBM, Chid is a senior member of the IEEE, a member of the AAAI and ACM SIGKDD, and has published extensively in his areas of expertise.