Gurjeet Singh
CEO
Ayasdi
Age: 33
Born: Ludhiana, Punjab, India
Gurjeet Singh's mission is to change the way the world uses complex data to solve its most pressing problems.
As the CEO of Ayasdi, he leads a technology movement that emphasizes the importance of extracting insight from data, not just storing and organizing it. This movement recognizes that while 90 percent of the world's data has been generated in the last two years alone, only 1 percent of that data has been analyzed. He feels that analyzing the next 99 percent represents the next frontier for humanity.
Industries from banking to healthcare have used Ayasdi's technology to uncover relationships in disparate data sets. The work on diabetes is particularly promising. Researchers at collaborator and client Mount Sinai Hospital were able to combine disparate sets of patient data in the Ayasdi software to discover six distinct subtypes of Type II Diabetes patients. This information is can help physicians develop more targeted treatments for patients with different subsets of the disease.
Singh is not afraid of hard work. He arrived at Stanford as a graduate student in mathematics with just enough funds to last one quarter of academic study and went on to develop hardware and software for research in computational fluid dynamics. Within a few months of joining a research group, he had developed the framework of Mapper, one of the first software programs that captured the exceptional power of topological data analysis. In only a few years, Singh finished his graduate studies; in fact, the time between his Master's degree and his Ph.D. was 30 months, a record that still stands in the Computational Mathematics Department at Stanford.
He them secured venture financing for Ayasdi and charted a path to commercialize his ground-breaking technology. Today, as the company's CEO, he leads a mission-driven organization whose technology has applications across industries and problems that deal with complexity.
One of Singh's first initiatives was to advance academic and nonprofit collaboration to address world health. Some of Ayasdi's noted collaborators include the University of California, San Francisco; Mount Sinai Hospital; U-BIOPRED; Harvest Choice (funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation); the Michael J. Fox Foundation; MIT and Harvard Medical School.
Ayasdi offers its collaborators software licenses, training and reviews of their findings. This work has resulted in papers published in key journals such as Scientific Reports, a Nature publication, along with academic awards for breakthrough research.
One of the most high-profile wins was in partnership with UCSF. Using Ayasdi's software, UCSF researchers were able to determine what types of injuries would result in what types of complicating factors, including post-traumatic stress disorder. The work is so promising that Ayasdi and UCSF were presented the GE/NFL Head Health award to explore how to better diagnose and treat mild traumatic brain injuries in professional football players.
Ayasdi works with academic institutions and nonprofits, allowing them to immediately find insights in their data that would normally take weeks, months or years. These organizations are working on finding breakthroughs in cancer, diabetes, traumatic brain injury and water in Africa.
The result of these collaborations is already making a difference. For example, in a recent scientific paper published in Scientific Reports in February, Singh and others applied Ayasdi technology to a 12-year old dataset of breast cancer tumors. In this paper, he disproved a commonly held belief that a particular estrogen marker was the most important factor in determining whether breast cancer patients live or die.
This research is now being used by several pharmaceutical companies to create new drug protocols for this previously undiscovered subgroup of breast cancer patients with positive outcomes. Interestingly, this 12-year old breast cancer study had been thoroughly examined and analyzed to the point where experts believed that everything that could have been discovered from it had been discovered. In contrast, Ayasdi was able to uncover the new insight in a matter of minutes.
Education: B. Tech, Delhi University; Ph.D., computational mathematics, Stanford University.
Best advice received: Probability of failure is irrelevant. 90 percent chance of failure means 10 percent chance of changing the world. (Vinod Khosla)
First job: ASIC design engineer at Texas Instruments.
Favorite job perk: Amazing colleagues.
Fantasy career: Heading a company that can change the world.
Word that best describes you: Purposeful.
Favorite stress release: Programming.
Favorite causes: Income inequality.
Favorite gadget: Apple MacBook Pro.
Where we'd most likely find you after hours: At home, entertaining my son or building robots.
Favorite car: Don't care.
Any secret talents ? I am very open — no secrets.