Ritendra Datta

Ritendra Datta is a San Francisco based AI and software engineering leader and practitioner, in addition to being a screenwriter, filmmaker, cinematographer, and film editor. Ritendra has previously worked at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in New York, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in California, Google in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and in Mountain View, California, and Facebook (now Meta) in California, and now Databricks, a late-stage startup in Data and AI. Valued at 43 billion dollars, Databricks is one of the world's most valuable pre-IPO companies. There, Ritendra is Head of Applied AI and Senior Director of Engineering. Before this, he was at Facebook in the role of Head of Video and Reels Recommendations and Director of Engineering, running a team of 200+ AI engineers and scientists. Prior to that, he spent a decade at Google's various AI-related engineering teams. His academic and professional work for 19+ years has spanned AI-based Search, Recommendations, Bioinformatics, and Business Analytics, starting well before AI went mainstream. Besides engineering, Ritendra is a regular writer on AI and technical leadership topics, with almost 20K followers and several million views of his articles on LinkedIn alone. Ritendra holds a PhD in Computer Science & Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning. His research publications have been cited over 8,800 times by other researchers in the field.