Ashish Kumar is a Senior Data Scientist at Validere, an oil and gas startup. He has a Ph.D. specializing in artificial intelligence in mining complexes from McGill University’s COSMO Laboratory, and received his Bachelor of Mining Engineering in 2014 from NIT Rourkela, India. He has over eight years of experience in machine learning, optimization, simulation, geostatistics, and reinforcement learning, and likes to talk about anything and everything related to product development. When he is not working he also enjoys hiking, listening to podcasts, and going on vacation.