Santanu Bhattacharya (data scientist)

For Indian bio-organic chemist and professor, see Santanu Bhattacharya.

Santanu Bhattacharya is an American data scientist. Currently, at the Camera Culture Group, MIT Media Lab.^[1] He is a serial entrepreneur and has worked for NASA and Facebook in the past.^[2] He has been a C-level executive at Fortune1000 corporations such as Airtel and Facebook and is a former visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Science.

Santanu Bhattacharya
Born	Northeast India
Citizenship	American
Alma mater	IIT Bombay MIT Sloan NASA Goddard Space Flight Center University of Maryland
Occupation(s)	Scientist at Camera Culture Group MIT Media Lab Visiting professor at Indian Institute of Science

Early life

Santanu was born in the remote sub-Himalayan part of Northeast India.^[3] After graduating high-school, he studied at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay before moving to the United States for graduate school.^[4]

Career

Santanu received his PhD from University of Maryland, College Park and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center where he conducted pathbreaking research on a new class of superconducting infrared detectors.^[5][6]

Following the academic experience, Santanu pursued an entrepreneurial path in data and automation at OriginLab. Led LIMS product development at Beckman Instruments and joined at Kearney to pursue management consulting with several marquee clients such as Gillette, Pepsi, BMW and Goldman Sachs.

In 2004 he joined AOL-Time Warner, where he led the creation of the Analytics Solution Centre, a global team who built technologies around AOL’s contextual and behavioural advertising targeting platforms.^[7][8]

In 2008, Santanu started Salorix, a Silicon Valley–based startup ^[9] whose product Amplfy enabled global brands to monetize social media campaigns by analyzing real-time social conversations and ranking the most effective engaging audience.^[10]

In 2014, he joined Facebook where he led Emerging Market Products functions that used data-driven technology to build new products for emerging user growth.^[11]

From 2015 to 2017, Santanu was Senior Vice President, Technology and Products at Delhivery, India’s largest third-party eCommerce logistics that went IPO in 2022.^[12][13][14] In 2018, he was appointed as the Chief Data Scientist of Airtel, world’s second largest telco with 450 million subscribers in 18 countries.^{[15][16][17][18]}

"India Class" data problems

In 2014, during his tenure at Facebook, he began to analyze systemic challenges specific to India. At the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, Santanu talked about his philosophy of solving "India Class" data problems that serve as a template for the rest of the world.^[19] According to his talks and writings on the topic, "India Class" problems are defined as being at the crossroad of exploding amount of private data (unstructured, incomplete, incorrect), nascent consumer behaviour with "switchers" who exchange or try out others phones, apps, expectations for software or services being free and relatively limited amount of public data on addresses, population, migration, income etc.^[1][20]

COVID-19 and data science

Bhattacharya was appointed as a member of the COVID-19 Mobility Data Network at Harvard University to "provide daily updates to decision-makers at the state and local levels on how well social distancing interventions are working." The team consisted of infectious disease epidemiologists and scientists working in partnership with tech companies to use aggregated mobility data in support of the COVID-19 response.^[21]

Networked Agents and Decentralized AI (NANDA)

Bhattacharya is working on Agentic AI and Project Nanda^[22]. NANDA is a large-scale research project conceived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to construct the underlying infrastructure of a completely decentralized network of self-governing AI agents^[23]. Technically, NANDA is based on the work that protocols like Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Google's Agent-to-Agent (A2A) framework have established. Its design incorporates a decentralized registry infrastructure that is a type of DNS for AI agents, enabling them to be found within dispersed environments. Agent communication is regulated through sophisticated agent-to-agent protocols that enable real-time discovery, and the sharing of knowledge within intricate networks ^[24].

Large Population Models

Santanu is working on Large Population Models. These are complex AI-Powered simulations that can replicate the behavior as well as interactions between large-scale populations. They can combine real-world multi-scale data to execute the simulations at high speed. It can also distribute computation over personal devices for real-time feedback which in turn also preserves privacy. Built at MIT Media Lab, LPMs allows for the prediction of systemic risks and actionable insights across diverse domains such as pandemic response, food security, and climate resilience.^[25]

Project Iceberg

Santanu is collaborating on Project Iceberg which is a research effort initiated in 2024 to estimate and dissect the economic effects of agentic artificial intelligence (AI), specifically within the context of the new Model Context Protocol (MCP). The project formally introduces the Iceberg Index, the very first quantitative measure proposed to ascertain economic vulnerability to AI automatability supported by MCP-assisted systems^[26]. The project is organized around three anchoring pillars-capture, analyze and compute. Researchers charted more than 171 million employees and 32,000+ individual skills, across 923 occupations that account for about  $9.4 trillion worth of annual labor value. Along with it, tracking of more than 13,000 MCP servers in real-time using MIT's NANDA Registry was done. Creation of custom algorithms to match MCP server abilities with occupations and skill sets was then completed and functional overlap between AI agents and human job demand was evaluated.^[27]