Our team

Nitendra is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and an IEEE Senior Member. Problems that currently interest him are in the area of anomaly detection, time-series modelling, information extraction, information representation, scalable machine learning and large graph networks. Nitendra comes with 20 years of experience at IBM Research, working on different aspects of machine learning, HCI, software engineering and mobile sensing.

Ankur Arora is a Vice President of Product Development at Mastercard AI Garage. He has shown his expertise in Data science and Artificial Intelligence by working and deploying 2 AI solutions producing multi million dollar revenue. He has filed over 100 patents with 30 granted patents in AI, ML and Blockchain and has published over 15 research papers in top AI conferences.

Ankur Saraswat is a Vice President of Product Development at Mastercard AI Garage. He is an experienced business leader with 16 years of experience spread across banking, e-commerce, retail & media, pharma domains. In his current role at AIG, he is responsible for development and deployment of products focussing on portfolio risk management for acquirers by means of providing timely alerts/insights and recommending preventive action plan. In addition to this, his team is also actively involved in various research initiatives focussing on varied topics thus creating IP and publishing papers.

Deepak Yadav is a Director of Product Development at Mastercard AI Garage. He graduated from IIT Kharagpur and IIM Calcutta and brings over 10 years of payment industry experience in fraud risk management, commercial credit risk management and merchant analytics and consulting. He has been managing development of state of art AI solutions for preventing fraud at merchants at various lifecycle stages. His current interest areas lie in graph neural networks, time series modelling, anomaly detection and generative AI.

Yatin Katyal is a Director of Product Development at Mastercard AI Garage. He has developed and deployed products across verticals in areas like Marketing, Bidding, HR, AML, Fraud, Authorization, Account takeover and Merchant Risk. He is responsible for scoping complex business problems & delivering sophisticated data science solutions. Yatin has 12 years of extensive experience in data science domain with expertise in e-commerce and banking industry. He is experienced in Big data driven Machine learning/Deep learning projects in areas like Natural Language Processing, Recommendation Systems, Classification/Regression Models, Time Series Forecasting, Unsupervised learning, anomaly detection and time-series modelling.

Maneet’s work focuses on modelling financial data for different applications involving utility of various AI/ML tools and technologies. She has done her PhD from IIIT-Delhi, with the Image Analysis and Biometrics Laboratory under the Infosys Center for Artificial Intelligence in the CSE department. Maneet was awarded the Overseas Research Fellowship at IIIT-Delhi, and has spent almost an year as a Visiting Research Scholar at the West Virginia University, USA, under Prof. Afzel Noore. As part of her PhD thesis, she has developed deep learning based models (such as autoencoders, convolutional neural network, capsule networks) for facial analysis in surveillance settings, specifically for low resolution data. She has also developed an application for face recognition in surveillance scenarios which was funded by the Ministry of Electronics and IT, Government of India. Recently her team was awarded the Facebook’s Ethics in AI research award, 2019 for our research on “Mitigating Bias in Face Recognition For Vast Regional Diversity in India”.

Siddhartha’s current research interest lies in developing AI and ML solution in industrial setting and has experience developing the same for payment industry, healthcare, renewable energy, mobile and voice based system, etc . In his Ph.D., Siddhartha has worked on building mobile system for developing region that was supported by TCS research fellowship. For his research work, Siddhartha has received several awards and travel grant from Google India, ACM SIGSOFT, Microsoft Reserach India, etc. During his Ph.D., he has worked with several organisation that includes Delhi Government, JJ Hospital (Mumbai), PGI Chandigarh, etc. Siddhartha has also served as reviewer for several prestigious research venues such ACM SIGCHI, ACM CODS-COMAD, AAAI, etc.

Alok has experience in AI/ML working in banking, healthcare and payment network domains. He has worked on disease prevention and fraud waste and abuse detection in healthcare working with Fortune 5 companies. He manages multiple product pipelines at Mastercard which solve the problem of declined authorization and Fraud using state-of-the-art AI techniques.

Aakarsh Malhotra works at Mastercard AI Garage under the Services division at Mastercard India. He leads a medium-sized team of scientists focusing on developing AI/ML and scalable graph solutions for various financial real-time products, ensuring safety of the financial ecosystem. He also leads many industry-academic collaborations with universities such as IIT Delhi, MIT, and Mitacs, which primarily focus on scalable graph learning and social analysis. Previously, he pursued his doctoral degree from the IAB lab at IIIT-Delhi, India, working in the domain of computer vision and biometrics. During his Ph.D., he received the prestigious Visvesvaraya Ph.D. fellowship by the Govt. of India alongside ORF and Ph.D. Forum Travel Award from IIIT-Delhi and WACV, respectively. He has publications in reputed AI journals and conferences such as KDD, IJCAI, ACM CIKM, T-BIOM, T-IFS, Pattern Recognition, and PLoS One, and has served as reviewer for most of them. Before his doctorate, he received his B.Tech. degree in computer science from IIIT-Delhi in 2015.

Soumyadeep Ghosh is serving as Director of Data Science at Mastercard AI Garage, leading a team of ML scientists, post-docs, and engineers to build AI-driven security solutions using deep neural networks. He specializes in applying cutting-edge research to create innovative machine learning systems for decisioning and fraud prevention. Soumyadeep holds a Ph.D. from IIIT Delhi, where he developed deep learning algorithms for video surveillance under government-funded projects. He regularly reviews for top AI conferences such as CVPR, ICML, AAAI, NeurIPS, ICCV, and so on. Passionate about mentorship, he advises post-docs through the MITACS program and drives learning initiatives at MasterCard, including paper reading groups and technical tutorials.

Suhas Powar has been working in the Mastercard AI Garage under the Services division at Mastercard India for the past six years. He leads a team of scientists focused on developing AI-based rule discovery and scalable graph solutions for various products, which helps ensure the safety of the financial ecosystem. He also leads the launchers training program, which provides a solid foundation for new hires through expert-led sessions. Previously, he completed a PGDBA program offered jointly by the IIM Calcutta, ISI Calcutta, and IIT Kharagpur. Before that, he worked at Reliance Industries Limited for over three years. He has publications in conferences such as ECAI and CIKM. He holds a Btech-Mtech dual degree from IIT Kanpur, where his thesis work involved using computer vision to analyze specimens during stress testing under a scanning electron microscope.