AI SAVVY - Key Persons


Dr. Bal Krishna Bal

Job Titles:
  • Principal Data Scientist
Bal has a PhD in Computer Science, his expertise is in Machine Learning and data analysis with a broad emphasis on text data processing. In the past, he was faculty at the University of Houston. He has built software that utilizes Natural Language Processing whilst managing a team of data scientists. He also did data and pattern analysis for cybersecurity applications. His PhD thesis analyzed large text dataset using innovative Natural Language Processing technologies he invented.

Dr. Dainis Boumber - CTO

Job Titles:
  • CTO
Dainis has 9 years of experience in Data Science and Software Engineering. He is an experienced developer, with expert-level skills in Tensorflow, scikit-learn, Python, fastai, Keras and other tools. He is an active researcher in Machine Learning and NLP with work in deep learning and authorship verification. He attended the University of Texas in Austin and the University of Houston, where he received his PhD.

Dr. Om Gnawali - CEO

Job Titles:
  • CEO
Om is a faculty member for Computer Science at the University of Houston where he teaches and does research in areas spanning Internet of Things, cybersecurity, crowdsourcing, data analysis, high performance networking and systems. In the past, he has built data acquisition and processing systems, and launched several startups in the big data area. He likes to build usable software that gives actionable insights to customers. He received his Bachelors and Masters from MIT, PhD from USC, all in computer science and was a postdoc at Stanford.

Dr. Ricardo Vilalta

Job Titles:
  • Associate Professor
  • Research Director
Ricardo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Houston and director of the Pattern Analysis Laboratory. His research interests include Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition, Data Mining, Artificial Intelligence, and AstroInformatics. In the past, he worked for the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and the Center for Research and Advanced Studies (CINVESTAV). He received his PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.