- Camera Culture
Dr. Santanu Bhattacharya is a researcher at the Camera Culture Group, working on Decentralized AI. His area of research includes Agentic AI and Project Nanda, in collaboration with Prof Ramesh Raskar. He is also a contributor on Large Population Models and Project Iceberg with graduate student Ayush Chopra, which focuses on jobs in the post AI world. Santanu has managed international innovation teams of scientists and technologists for the past 20 years, producing innovations that have generated about $10 billion in economic value, ran two successful startups and was C-level exec at Fortune 1000 companies.
Prior to joining MIT Media Lab, he was the Chief Technologist at NatWest Bank (UK), where he oversaw the creation of data assets and products for the 2,200-person worldwide engineering team and advanced the bank's vision to become a data-driven relationship bank for the twenty-first century.
He oversaw innovation and data sciences for 350 million consumers as the Chief Data Scientist at Airtel, the second-largest telco in the world, where also implemented a new network rollout plan utilizing Google Maps, mobile phone/tower data, and deep learning algorithms, saving over a billion dollars in operations cost.
As the SVP of Technology at Delhivery ($4B IPO in 2021), India’s largest third party eCommerce Logistics company, that worked on solving the "India Class" problem of 'Address Disambiguation in Emerging Markets’, significantly increasing the effectiveness of routing and delivery of eCommerce parcels across India, where lack of formal addresses is a major bottleneck. Numerous international media outlets, including Le Monde and most recently the Economist, have extensively reported this work.
In the past, oversaw Facebook's (Meta) Emerging Market Products, which had 300 million members across 79 countries and was the Global Head of America Online's (AOL) Analytics Solution Center.
Santanu is a graduate of IIT-Bombay and MIT. He also holds a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and a member of the engineering team of the CASSINI/Huygens mission to Saturn, a member of the Harvard University's global pandemic data advisory board during COVID-19, and a speaker at the World Economic Forum at Davos. Santanu is on many academic, government and international advisory boards and was a former Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Science and an instructor at the NATO's Advanced Studies Institute. He has widely covered in Forbes, Techcrunch, The Economist, Le Monde, Wall Street Journal and The Economic Times.