Biographical note

Viswa Viswanathan is an associate professor of Computing and Decision Sciences at the Stillman School of Business in Seton Hall University. After completing his PhD in Artificial Intelligence, Viswa spent a decade in academia and then switched to a leadership position in the software industry for another decade during which he worked for Infosys, Igate, and Starbase. He embraced academia once again in 2001. Viswa has taught extensively in fields ranging from operations research, computer science, software engineering, management information systems, and enterprise systems. In addition to university teaching, Viswa has conducted training programs for industry professionals and has written several peer-reviewed research publications in journals such as Operations Research, IEEE Software, Computers and Industrial Engineering, and International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education. He has authored a book titled Data Analytics with R:A hands-on approach. Viswa thoroughly enjoys hands-on software development and has single-handedly conceived, architected, developed, and deployed several web-based applications. Apart from his deep interest in technical fields such as data analytics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and software engineering, Viswa harbors a deep interest in education with special emphasis on the roots of learning and methods to foster deeper learning. He has done research in this area and hopes to pursue the subject further. Viswa would like to express deep gratitude to professors Amitava Bagchi and Anup Sen, who were inspirational forces during his early research career. He is also grateful to several extremely intelligent colleagues, notable among them being Rajesh Venkatesh, Dan Richner, and Sriram Bala, who significantly shaped his thinking. His aunt, Analdavalli; his sister, Sankari; and his wife, Shanthi, taught him much about hard work, and even the little he has absorbed has helped him immensely. His sons, Nitin and Siddarth, have helped with numerous insightful comments on various topics. Shanthi Viswanathan is an experienced technologist who has delivered technology management and enterprise architecture consulting to many enterprise customers. She has worked for Infosys Technologies, Oracle Corporation, and Accenture. As a consultant, Shanthi has helped several large organizations such as Canon, Cisco, Celgene, Amway, Time Warner Cable, and GE, among others, in areas such as data architecture and analytics, master data management, service-oriented architecture, business process management, and modeling. When she is not in front of her Mac, Shanthi spends time hiking in the suburbs of NY/NJ, working in the garden, and teaching yoga. Shanthi would like to thank her husband, Viswa, for all the great discussions on numerous topics during their hikes together and for exposing her to R and Java. She would also like to thank her sons, Nitin and Siddarth, for getting her into the data analytics world. Atmajitsinh Gohil works as a senior consultant at a consultancy firm in New York City. After graduating, he worked in the financial industry as a Fixed Income Analyst. He writes about data manipulation, data exploration, visualization, and basic R plotting functions on his blog. Atmajitsinh has a master's degree in Financial Economics from the State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo. He also graduated with a master of arts degree in Economics from University of Pune, India. He loves to read blogs on data visualization and loves to go out on hikes in his free time. Yu-Wei, Chiu (David Chiu) is the founder of LargitData. He has previously worked for Trend Micro as a software engineer with the responsibility of building big data platforms for business intelligence and customer relationship management systems. In addition to being a start-up entrepreneur and data scientist, he specializes in using Spark and Hadoop to process big data and apply data mining techniques for data analysis. Yu-Wei is also a professional lecturer and has delivered lectures on Python, R, Hadoop, and tech talks at a variety of conferences. In 2013, Yu-Wei reviewed Bioinformatics with R Cookbook (Packt Publishing).