On Assignment for The Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering Magazine’s Spring 2024 special issue on: "Artificial intelligence advances are rocking our world. What’s the promise—and potential peril?" Interview with 1984 Hopkins grad, Alok Aggarwal Phd, CEO and Chief Data Scientist at Scry AI and author of The Fourth Industrial Revolution and 100 Years of AI (1950–2050).
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Advancing Innovation
By Nikolas Charles
Spring 2024
Alok Aggarwal, PhD '84, is the author of The Fourth Industrial Revolution and 100 Years of AI (1950–2050), and CEO and chief data scientist of Scry AI, a San Jose–based analytics firm that develops AI software solutions for the financial, technology, and health care industries. Scry AI is named after an early 16th-century verb that means “foretelling the future using a crystal ball.”
"Eventually, AI will be used in nearly all industries. Within 15–20 years, it will mimic humans in numerous complex tasks, often with better accuracy." --- Alok Aggarwal
In 2014, Aggarwal launched the Silicon Valley startup, which now has 320 employees and offices in Delhi-Gurgaon, India. “We’re utilizing algorithm-based methods to provide intelligent document processing,” he says. The company’s signature product, Collatio, inspired by the word “collation,” extracts financial, legal, and operational Excel spreadsheets and PDFs for end users. Typical clients for the quick and accurate organizational software include financial institutions providing business loans.
Scry AI offers four additional software programs to detect anomalies, predict operational risks, identify fraud, and extract data. Its Data Flow Mapping program utilizes more than 60 proprietary algorithms to reverse engineer previously programmed processes.
Before founding his current enterprise, Aggarwal was for 13 years co-founder and chairman of Evalueserve, a research and analytics company where he pioneered the concept of knowledge process outsourcing.
He previously held various key leadership roles at IBM for 16 years, including founding and directing the IBM India Research Lab, which was affiliated with the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, where he earned his BTech degree in 1980.