One Hundred Years of Artificial Intelligence and Its Future with the Intersection of Blockchain Technology, with Dr. Alok Aggarwal @ Scry AI

Dr. Alok Aggarwal received his bachelor’s in technology from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi in 1980. In 1984, he received his Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. He worked at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center in New York between 1984-2000. During 1987 and 1989 Fall Terms, he took a sabbatical from IBM to teach two courses and supervise two Ph.D. students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Between 1993-1995, along with others, he built and sold a "Supply Chain Management Solution" for paper mills and steel mills, which was the first commercial Artificial Intelligence based solution of its kind. By optimizing paper machines, trimmers, winders, warehouses, transportation, and the loading of trucks and railroad cars, their solution saved paper mills substantially in the mills’ operating costs. In 1993, Madison Paper Company in the United States was the first to buy this solution. And the company used this solution until 2017, when it was sold to a Norwegian paper company.

Between 1996-1997, Dr. Aggarwal joined the Strategy Department of IBM Research Division, which was then greatly involved in strategizing and organizing chess matches between Deep Blue and Gary Kasparov. In July 1997, IBM Research Division announced the formation of “IBM’s India Research Laboratory” (IRL). Dr. Aggarwal “founded” IRL inside IIT Delhi on April 1, 1998. By August 2000, he had grown it from "ground zero" to a 60-member team (with 30 PhDs and 30 people with master’s in computer science and related areas).

In January 2001, he co-founded Evalueserve (www.evalueserve.com ), which currently has more than 4,500 employees and provides various kinds of research, analytics, and consulting services to clients worldwide. In 2003, he wrote the first article regarding “Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO),” which estimated the amount of such work that would be outsourced from high-wage countries (like the United States) to low-wage countries (like India). Today, KPO is a well-known term in the outsourcing industry and is considered a sector on its own with more than 300 KPO companies in India alone.

In February 2014, Dr. Aggarwal founded Scry Analytics (now “Scry AI”) that performs research and development (R&D) in Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, and related areas. Scry AI ( www.scryai.com ) also has five product groups and a distributed platform for Internet of Things. These improve efficiency of business workflows regarding quality, timeliness, revenue, cost, customer experience, compliance, and operational risks. Scry AI has its primary center in San Jose, California. And it has three other centers in Gurgaon, Pune, and Hyderabad, India.

He has published 120 research articles, has been granted 8 patents from the US Patents and Trademark Office, and has been an editor of several academic journals in Computer Science. Furthermore, between 1998-2000, he was a member of Executive Committee on Information Technology of the Confederation of the Indian Industry (CII) and the Telecom Committee of Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). During 2002 and 2005, he was on the executive board of TiE’s (The Indus Entrepreneur). In 2008, Dr. Aggarwal received Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Delhi. In December 2000, he published a book titled, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution & 100 Years of AI (1950-2050)”, which is available on Amazon and other book stores.