Dr. Aggarwal was born in Delhi, India on May 04, 1959, he earned his Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. Thereafter, he moved to the United States to pursue higher education and research. In 1981 he completed his Master of Science and in 1984, Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
From 1984 to 2000, he pursued research in Computer Science at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He took a sabbatical from IBM Research from 1988 to 1989 to become a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he taught courses in Computational Geometry and advised two PhD students. He is known for his research in the following areas:
Monge Arrays An m * n array, A, is said to be a Monge array if, for all j, k, ℓ such that 1 ≤ i < k ≤ m and 1 ≤ j < ℓ ≤ n, the following condition holds for all its 2 * 2 subarrays: A[i,j] + A[k,l] ≤ A[i,l] + A[k,j]
These arrays are named after Gaspard Monge, a French mathematician and engineer, who used their inherent properties in 1781 to solve transportation problems [1] . Dr. Aggarwal and his colleagues used these arrays to develop the SMAWK algorithm that improved computational time for solving numerous problems in Computer Science and Operations Research. These problems include many in Computational Geometry and special cases related to the Traveling Salesman Problem, Batching Problem, Assignment Problem, Scheduling Problem, and d-dimensional Transportation Problem [2, 3, 4]. The survey papers mentioned in [5, 6] and the Wikipedia page regarding Monge Arrays provide additional information regarding the ongoing research in this burgeoning field that comprises more than 2,000 articles.
External Memories and Hierarchical Memories Since data is being produced at an exponential rate, contemporary computing systems are unable to store it in their internal memories. Hence, modern systems use external memories that can be accessed by their computing processors in blocks of fixed length and in time that is much larger than the access time from internal memories. In 1986, along with Dr. Vitter, Dr. Aggarwal laid the theoretical foundations for designing fast algorithms in computing systems with external memories, thereby creating a novel field of external memory algorithms (also known as Input/Output or I/O algorithms) [7].
Remarkably, these foundations led to the formation of a new company in 2006, Tokutek [8], which was founded by Dr. M. Farach-Colton, Dr. M. A. Bender, and Dr. B. Kuszmaul. By using improved external memory algorithms, Tokutek transformed the way data is stored and retrieved for faster computation. Tokutek delivered a quantum leap in the performance of databases and file systems, and it was bought by Percona in 2015 [9]. Articles mentioned in [10] [11], the book titled Algorithms and Data Structures for External Memory [12], and the Wikipedia page regarding External Memory Algorithms provide information regarding about the current state of research and development in this area.
In 1988, along with Dr. Chandra and other colleagues in the IBM Research Division, Dr. Aggarwal realized that because data is being produced in enormous quantities, external memories will be hierarchical in nature where in a larger sized memory will be connected to several smaller sized memories, which in turn will be connected to even smaller sized memories [13]. They also realized that accessing data from smaller memories will be much faster than that from larger memories. Keeping this in view, they designed several models of such hierarchical memory systems and then built algorithms for them that were superior to those that were known earlier. [14] [15]
AI-based Software for Supply Chain Management From 1993 to 1995, along with Dr. Murthy and others in the IBM Research Division, he built and sold a “Supply Chain Management Solution” for paper mills. This was the first commercial Artificial Intelligence-based solution of its kind. By optimizing paper machines, trimmers, winders, warehouses, loading of trucks, and transportation, their AI solution was able to save a typical paper mill around 1.5% in operating costs.
In 1993, Madison Paper Company in the United States was the first to buy this solution and it used this solution until 2017 (i.e., for almost 25 years) until this company was sold to a Norwegian paper company. Dr. Aggarwal and his colleagues published an influential paper titled, “Cooperative Multi-objective Decision Support for the Paper Industry” [16] which won the Daniel H. Wagner Prize from INFORMS in 1998 [17].
During 1997-98, Dr. Aggarwal became passionate about building organizations from the ground up and during the next 25 years, he built the following three organizations:
Founder and “First” Director of IBM’s India Research Laboratory, IRL, (1998-2000) In July 1997, IBM Research Division announced the formation of IBM’s India Research Laboratory (IRL). The opening ceremony was attended by Dr. Yoginder K. Alagh, Minister for Science and Technology and Power, (Government of India), and Mr. Richard Celeste, the US Ambassador to India. [18] On January 1, 1998, Dr. Aggarwal founded IRL inside IIT Delhi. By August 2000, he had grown IRL to a 60-member team, with 30 PhDs and 30 Masters of Computer Science and related areas. By 2022, IRL had more than 150 researchers in Delhi-Gurgaon and Bangalore working on emerging technologies such as Hybrid Cloud, Artificial Intelligence, Climate and Sustainability, and Quantum Computing. [19]
Co-founder and Chairman of Evalueserve (2001-2013) In January 2001, he co-founded Evalueserve and became its chairman. In 2003, Evalueserve pioneered the concept of “ Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) ” – a term that was coined by its chief operating officer, Ashish Gupta. During the next ten years, Dr. Aggarwal wrote several influential articles regarding KPO [20] [21] and made it a famous sub-sector within the outsourcing industry. Today, Evalueserve is a leading company with more than 5,000 employees that provides various kinds of research and analytics services to clients in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific regions from its research centers around the world.
Founder of Scry AI (2014 - present) In 2013, Dr. Aggarwal stepped down from being the Chairman of the Board of Evalueserve. In February 2014, he founded Scry AI (formerly known as Scry Analytics) and became its CEO and chief data scientist. Scry AI focuses on research and advanced development (R&D) in Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, and related disciplines. Its primary R&D centers are located in San Jose, California, and Delhi-Gurgaon, Pune, and Hyderabad, India. The company has four product lines that optimize business workflows and improve their key performance indicators such as quality, timeliness, revenue, cost, customer experience, compliance, and operational risks.
Dr. Alok Aggarwal collaborated with his wife Dr. Sangeeta Aggarwal (hematologist-oncologist) and a team of distinguished researchers to establish the “Voice of Cancer Patients” platform. The main goals of this platform are to exploit AI-based techniques for providing critical insights regarding cancer patients and survivors, known and often-not-known side effects of cancer drugs and therapies, as well as roadmaps of patients’ journeys as they fight cancer. This platform has already conducted fifteen research projects whose results have been presented at several conferences including ASCO’s Annual Meeting, San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, and Stanford University’s Conference on Big Data in Biomedicine [22] [23] [24] [25]
During 1997-2000, he was a member of the Executive Committee on Information Technology of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the Telecom Committee of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). Since 2002, he has been a charter member of The Indus Entrepreneur (TiE) organization and was on the executive board of its New York chapter between 2002 and 2005. Furthermore, he has served as the Chairperson of the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing. He has been on the editorial boards of SIAM Journal of Computing, Algorithmica, and Journal of Symbolic Computation.
Dr. Alok Aggarwal authored the following eight patents that were approved by the US Patent and Trademark Office:
Drs. Alok and Sangeeta Aggarwal have two children, Dr. Adeeti Aggarwal (MD-PhD, Neuroscience) and Prof. Amol Aggarwal (Columbia University, Math Department).