Founder: Dr. Inderpal Bhandari
Dr. Inderpal Bhandari, the founder and CEO of
Virtual Gold, Inc., is an internationally recognized expert in data mining, the
art of using computer programs to discover knowledge from large amounts of
data. Under his leadership, Virtual Gold developed its powerful patent-pending
VirtualMiner™ technology that enables business managers to make more accurate
decisions by alerting them to hidden patterns in business data that are
discovered automatically. While other data mining platforms can find patterns
that have statistical merit, VirtualMiner goes much further by discovering
hidden patterns that can actually impact the business. Dr. Bhandari has built
Virtual Gold into a market leading company with strategic partnerships with
companies such as IBM and Dictaphone and blue-chip customers like Merrill
Lynch, Chubb & Son, Bank of
America, CBS Sportsline, Boston
Celtics, Phoenix Suns and other teams of the National Basketball Association
and the Professional Golfers Association.
Prior to founding Virtual Gold, he was a member of the research staff at the
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center from 1990-1997. At IBM, he created Advanced
Scout, a data mining program used extensively by coaches of the National
Basketball Association to devise new strategies based on the automatic
identification of hidden patterns in game data and video. It was the first
instance ever of powerful data mining analyses being made available to such
non-technical users and consequently, Advanced Scout was featured extensively
in the popular press and in academic journals.
Prior to Advanced Scout, he was the first to recognize that finding hidden
patterns in defect data would improve dramatically IBM’s internal process for
software development. He developed this idea, applying it to key IBM software
products, leading to savings of several million dollars for the company. In
1999, this work was cited as a turning point in the 38-year history of software
development at IBM.
He was also a project director in several other areas, leading data mining
projects in insurance, customer satisfaction, and direct marketing. He authored
a software patent and received several prestigious awards for his work at IBM.
Dr. Bhandari was educated at Carnegie Mellon University (Ph.D., Electrical
& Computer Engineering, 1990), the University of Massachusetts at Amherst
(MS, 1985) and the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India
(B.Tech., Electrical & Electronics Engineering. His Ph.D. dissertation was
supervised jointly by Dan Siewiorek of the National Academy of Engineers and
the Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon, leaving him with a debt of deep gratitude to
these outstanding teachers.
Dr. Bhandari has been interviewed for his body of work in both the popular
and academic press including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington
Post, U.S. News and World Report, Computer World, PC Week, CNN, Fox, Discovery,
and MSNBC. He has published extensively in computer-related publications
and is the Executive Editor-at-Large of DS-Star, an on-line journal for
Business Intelligence executives. He is also a frequent contributor to academic
journals and speaker at important industry functions.
His seminal journal contributions include:
Advanced Scout: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in NBA Data. Inderpal
Bhandari, Ed Colet, Jennifer Parker, Zachary Pines, Rajiv Pratap, and
Krishnakumar Ramanujam. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, March 1997.
Models of Test Selection. Inderpal Bhandari, Herbert Simon, and
Daniel Siewiorek. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics,
October 1995.
In-Process Improvement Through Defect Data Interpretation. I.
Bhandari, M. Halliday, et al, IBM Systems Journal 33, No. 1, 1994.
Attribute Focusing: Machine-Assisted Knowledge Discovery Applied
to Software Production Process Control. Inderpal Bhandari. Knowledge
Acquisition, September 1994.
Selected speaking engagements include:
Invited Address to the National Security Agency, July 2001
Keynote speaker at IBM Research Center annual offsite retreat, April 2000
Keynote speaker at IBM-NBA seven-city lecture series for executives, March
to June 1999
Invited speaker at Kellogg Graduate School of Management "Digital
Frontiers" conference, Evanston, IL, September 1998
Keynote address to joint SIGMOD/PODS Conference, Tucson, AZ, May 1997
Keynote address at the DCI Data Warehouse World Event, New York, NY, August
1996
