Ashwin Rao
Chief Technology Officer
AI, Engineering
Palo Alto, California, USA
Listen to Ashwin’s Podcast!
Dr. Ashwin Rao has more than two decades of extensive experience across business, academia and Wall Street, with a consistent focus on creating outsized business value through technological innovations. Specifically, he has led science and engineering teams building products for Trading, Risk-Management, Pricing, Forecasting, Supply-Chain, Personalized Customer Experience. He brings unique skills in translating challenging business problems into technical specifications, and solving them by blending traditional mathematical/algorithmic methods with modern machine learning methods.
Ashwin is currently the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at o9 Solutions, a software company that is powering enterprise planning and decisioning models across 30-plus industry verticals with its AI-powered Digital Brain platform. At o9, Ashwin is helping build upon the company’s founding premise: Connecting the siloes of enterprise planning and execution to transform end-to-end decision-making is the top value-creation driver in a world of rising volatility and uncertainty.
Ashwin is also an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University where he focuses his research and teaching on AI for Sequential Optimal Decisioning under Uncertainty, particularly Reinforcement Learning algorithms and particularly applied to financial trading and retail industry problems.
He is the author of a book on Reinforcement Learning for Trading, and has developed extensive open-source code for models and algorithms on this topic. He holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical Computer Science from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and a B.Tech. in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Dr. Rao resides in Palo Alto, CA., where he’s an active member of the AI community.
Ashwin Rao is also featured on our premiere Features Page, and you can read the Podcast Interview Transcript.
