Ashwin Rao

Ashwin Rao is the Co-Founder of CX Score, a tech startup that enables enterprises to evaluate and improve the customer experience on their web and mobile apps. Ashwin is also an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, focusing his research and teaching in the area of Stochastic Control, particularly Reinforcement Learning algorithms with applications in Finance and Retail. He teaches Stanford CME 241: Foundations of Reinforcement Learning with Applications in Finance, which is based on the book he has written with the same title as this course.

Previously, Ashwin led Data Science and Machine Learning at Target, where he and his team developed mathematical models and algorithms for supply-chain and logistics, merchandising, marketing, search, personalization, pricing and customer service. Before that, Ashwin was a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley and a Trading Strategist at Goldman Sachs. Ashwin holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT-Bombay and a Ph.D in Computer Science from University of Southern California, where he specialized in Algorithms Theory and Abstract Algebra.

Ashwin's Stanford Home Page is: http://stanford.edu/~ashlearn and the github code associated with his RL-For-Finance book is at: https://github.com/TikhonJelvis/RL-book/tree/master/rl