Biography

Vasant Dhar is Professor and Head of the Information Systems Group at New York University Stern School of Business.

Professor Dhar teaches courses on Digital Marketing, Trading Strategies, and Prediction. His research is on data-driven predictive analytics in finance, healthcare, and social phenomena. He also writes on IT-driven transformation such as the one currently driving education, and implications for how firms talk to customers and partners and govern data responsibly.

Professor Dhar has been with NYU Stern for more than 30 years. His longstanding research has been on building robust automated decision making systems from large databases based on principles and methods from Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and related disciplines. The emphasis is on predictive modeling, across areas that span financial markets and other domains including economic networks, news, sponsored search markets, and blogs and other user generated content. His more recent research has been on issues related to the corporate governance of data and information technologies that balances their simultaneous benefits and risks, and on the transformational aspects of these technologies in business and society. This research also has direct pedagogical implications for how information technologies are taught and discussed from a business perspective.

He has written over 70 research articles, funded by grants from industry and the National Science Foundation. He pioneered the use of machine learning for predictive modeling on Wall Street across proprietary systematic trading, risk management, and customer and salesforce management. He is a frequent speaker in academic as well as industrial forums.

Professor Dhar received his Bachelor of Technology in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, and his Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy in artificial intelligence from the University of Pittsburgh.

Research Interests

• Data Mining
• Digital Marketing

Courses Taught

• Digital Marketing
• Trading Strategies and Systems

Academic Background

Ph.D., Artificial Intelligence, 1984
University of Pittsburgh

M.Phil., 1982
University of Pittsburgh

B.Tech., Chemical Engineering, 1978
Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi

Awards & Appointments