The Future of Machine Intelligence

Chapter 7. Gurjeet Singh: Using Topology to Uncover the Shape of Your Data

Gurjeet Singh is CEO and co-founder of Ayasdi, a company that leverages machine intelligence software to automate and accelerate discovery of data insights. The author of numerous patents and publications in top mathematics and computer science journals, Gurjeet has developed key mathematical and machine learning algorithms for topological data analysis.

Key Takeaways

• The field of topology studies the mapping of one space into another through continuous deformations.

• Machine learning algorithms produce functional mappings from an input space to an output space and lend themselves to be understood using the formalisms of topology.

• A topological approach allows you to study datasets without assuming a shape beforehand and to combine various machine learning techniques while maintaining guarantees about the underlying shape of the data.

Let’s get started by talking about your background and how you got to where you are today.

I am a mathematician and a computer scientist, originally from India. I got my start in the field at Texas Instruments, building integrated software and performing digital design. While at TI, I got to work on a project using clusters of specialized chips called digital signal processors (DSPs) to solve computationally hard math problems.

As an engineer by training, I had a visceral fear of advanced math. I didn’t want to be found out as a fake, so I enrolled in the Computational ...