Airtel appoints ex-NASA scientist as chief data scientist

India's largest telecom operator Bharti Airtel has appointed ex-NASA scientist Santanu Bhattacharya as the company's chief data scientist. Bhattacharya will be responsible to accelerate efforts around emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality.

"We are pleased to have Santanu onboard with us as we transform Airtel into a truly digital organization and start using Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to solve real business problems," said Harmeen Mehta, Global CIO and Head of Digital, Bharti Airtel.

At Airtel, Bhattacharya will be responsible for leveraging data science capabilities and deep analytics to understand the unique needs of customers and develop new products and services at Airtel. He will be based out of Bangalore and will directly report to Harmeen Mehta.

In the past, Bhattacharya had led Facebook's mobile products in emerging markets like India, Brazil, and Indonesia for a year and later served as the data science's head at e-commerce logistics company Delhivery for two years. He also had stints at NASA and AOL and co-founded a social media analytics company Salorix in 2009.