Dr Avik Sarkar is the former head of Data Analytics Cell at NITI (National Institution for Transforming India) Aayog, a premier policy think-tank of the Government of India developing roadmap for use of data, analytics and artificial intelligence for Governance, Policy making and India's inclusive growth and led efforts towards setting up the first High Performance Computing based Data Analytics Lab at NITI Aayog.

Dr Sarkar has over 18 years of experience across different aspects of data analytics, statistical modeling, data/text mining across companies like IBM, Accenture, Nokia, NASA, Persistent Systems, etc. In his last role at Accenture Consulting (Singapore), Dr Sarkar contributed to various data and analytics related engagements with Singapore Government. Dr Sarkar developed the Monte Carlo Simulation component in IBM SPSS and was the analytics architect for IBM solution on Predictive Maintenance and Quality (PMQ). Dr Sarkar holds a PhD from The Open University (UK), Masters from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay and Bachelors from Calcutta University.

Dr Sarkar has authored several technical publications and technology patents. Dr Sarkar has been nominated among the "Top 10 Data Scientists in India" in 2017 by the Analytics India Magazine and nominated as "LinkedIn Influencer" in the Technology space in 2015 for contribution and engaging discussions on the LinkedIn platform in areas related of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, etc.