Dr. Kishore Swaminathan

As the chief scientist of Accenture, Dr. Kishore Swaminathan defines Accenture's Technology Vision and helps set Accenture's technology and research agenda. He also directly heads Accenture's Systems Integration research located in Chicago (US), Silicon Valley, California (US), Sophia Antipolis (France) and Bangalore (India).

Born and raised in the 2,500 year old city of Madurai in southern India, Swaminathan took an interest in science while studying, ironically, history. "I realized that the ideas of Archimedes and Pythagoras endure but not the empire of Alexander," he recalls. "It made me want to focus on science to understand the world in a deep way, taking nothing for granted, but questioning everything."

At 18, he enrolled in the elite Indian Institute of Technology at Madras, where he received his Bachelor of Technology in aeronautical engineering, and then went on to earn his master's and Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "Even my doctoral dissertation was concerned with science," Swaminathan says. "I was interested in artificial intelligence and natural language processing, so I focused on how computers might be able to process scientific literature and discover scientific trends."