Anand Rao
Partner and Innovation Lead, Data and Analytics, PwC

Anand Rao is a partner in PwC’s Advisory Practice and the innovation lead for the Data and Analytics Group, where he leads the design and deployment of artificial intelligence and other advanced analytical techniques and decision support systems for clients, including natural language processing, text mining, social listening, speech and video analytics, machine learning, deep learning, intelligent agents, and simulation. Anand is also responsible for open source software tools related to Apache Hadoop and packages built on top of Python and R for advanced analytics as well as research and commercial relationships with academic institutions and startups, research, development, and commercialization of innovative AI, big data, and analytic techniques. Previously, Anand was the chief research scientist at the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute; program director for the Center of Intelligent Decision Systems at the University of Melbourne, Australia; and a student fellow at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center. He has held a number of board positions at startups and currently serves as a board member for a not-for-profit industry association. Anand has coedited four books and published over 50 papers in refereed journals and conferences. He was awarded the most influential paper award for the decade in 2007 from Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS) for his work on intelligent agents. He’s a frequent speaker on AI, behavioral economics, autonomous cars and their impact, analytics, and technology topics in academic and trade forums. Anand holds an MSc in computer science from Birla Institute of Technology and Science in India, a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Sydney, where he was awarded the university postgraduate research award, and an MBA with distinction from Melbourne Business School.