Srujana Kaddevarmuth | Opening New Realms of Data Science and AI

<p>Srujana Kaddevarmuth began her career near Bangalore, India after completing her master’s degree in engineering from Visvesvaraya Technological University. She has had a successful career in the tech industry and currently holds the position of senior director at Walmart's Data and Machine Learning Center of Excellence.</p><p>In her role as senior director at Walmart, Srujana leads the AI portfolio for various aspects of the company's retail business, including omni retail, new and emerging businesses in the consumer and tech space, data monetization, and membership. Her primary responsibility is to drive innovation and promote the democratization of data and AI, aiming to create value for consumers, associates, and the business as a whole.</p><p>Despite coming from an academic family, Srujana chose to pursue a career in the corporate sector rather than academia. After obtaining her bachelor’s degree in engineering, she gained real-world exposure to data science and AI while working at the Energy and Resources Institute. This experience fascinated her, leading her to pursue a master’s degree in engineering with an emphasis on operational research and data science.</p><p>She then started her career as a data scientist at Hewlett-Packard, where she worked on market mix models in the consumer and marketing domain. Later, she led the big data analytics center of excellence at Hewlett-Packard and went on to work at Accenture, where she led a partnership with Google, developing various models for consumer hardware products before joining Walmart.</p><p>Entering the corporate world after graduation, Srujana was surprised by the importance of collaboration in data science. She realized that building excellent algorithms alone is not enough; teamwork and collaboration are essential, particularly in applied data science.</p><p>As a leader, Srujana prioritizes assigning projects to data scientists and AI experts based on their individual interests to keep them intellectually stimulated. She also empowers her team to make