Dr. Radhika Kulkarni is an Advanced Analytics professional, active in the areas of Operations Research, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. She retired after 35 years of leading various areas of analytics R&D at SAS Institute, Inc. For the last 10 years of her professional career, Dr. Kulkarni was the Vice President of Advanced Analytics R&D, overseeing software development in many analytical areas including Statistics, Operations Research, Econometrics, Forecasting, Data Mining, and Machine Learning. She was responsible for the world’s leading analytics software products portfolio. One of the hallmarks of her leadership was fostering inter-disciplinary collaboration across the research teams with diverse analytical expertise.
In addition to leading the R&D efforts, Dr. Kulkarni also spearheaded the creation of the OR/AIML Center of Excellence at SAS Institute and established it as an expert consulting services group to solve the toughest analytical problems for a diverse set of Fortune 100 companies. Under her leadership, O.R. gained recognition as a key contributor to scalability and performance of algorithms in statistics, machine learning, forecasting, data mining, econometrics, etc. She inspired a collaborative spirit across the different domains resulting in several cutting-edge innovations and received the CEO Award of Excellence at SAS Institute.
Dr. Kulkarni has been an active member of INFORMS throughout her career and has been a member of the INFORMS Roundtable and several INFORMS committees. She is passionate about ensuring that OR/MS is recognized as a key discipline in the world of analytics. In addition to INFORMS she has been an executive sponsor for the American Statistical Association, KDD, and other professional societies. She has contributed in numerous ways to advance the careers of analytics professionals and was aptly recognized as a role model for women in analytics with the WORMS Award in 2006. She was recognized as an INFORMS Fellow in 2014.
Dr. Kulkarni served as the 2022 President of INFORMS. During her three-year term on the INFORMS Board, she chaired an AI adhoc committee responsible for the AI strategy for INFORMS. One of the key goals of this strategy has been to advance and promote OR and Analytics within AI and to work closely with the AI community to exploit the synergies of the AI and OR communities to transform highly scalable, actionable insights into automated data-driven decision-making. Among other activities under this initiative, Dr. Kulkarni led the organization of a series of AI-OR Workshops on Artificial Intelligence in conjunction with the CCC, INFORMS and ACM SIGAI to promote increased collaboration across multiple communities at the research forefront of AI.
A key accomplishment for INFORMS was the significant modernization effort that was initiated and accomplished successfully during Dr. Kulkarni’s term on the Board. This was the Amendment to the INFORMS constitution which had been adopted in 1995 and needed an update, both from a technology and operational standpoint.
Dr. Kulkarni serves on the Advisory Council of the School of ORIE at Cornell University, the Master of Science in Analytics Advisory Board at Georgia Institute of Technology and the Advisory Board for the Business Analytics Program at Sabanci University in Turkey.
Dr. Kulkarni has a Bachelor’s in Mathematics from Presidency College, Madras, a Master’s in Mathematics from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, and a Master’s (1979) and Ph.D. (1981) in Operations Research from Cornell University.