From Tandon to Forbes 30 Under 30

“What never grows old?” the editors of Forbes asked rhetorically. “The burning desire of youth to reinvent the world. That ambition and impatience is on full display in our 2018 edition of the Forbes 30 under 30, our annual encyclopedia of creative disruption.”

On that list were two figures who spent time here at Tandon: Alum Anshul Vikram Pandey, who appeared in the category of Enterprise Technology, and former research fellow Rafael García Aceves, honored in the category of Law and Policy.

Anshul Vikram Pandey

Pandey earned his doctoral degree in computer science in early 2017, but thanks in some part to the encouragement of his professors, he started his own company in 2013, while still a student. Accern, as he and his business partner, Kumesh Aroomoogan, dubbed the enterprise, uses advanced natural language processing, event detection, filtration, and machine learning algorithms to mine deeper regions of the Internet in order to provide institutional financial investors with news that hasn’t yet been picked up by major sites. These “actionable rumors,” as Pandey calls them, might include information about important events, such as lawsuits and takeovers, and they can have appreciable effects on a company’s stock prices and market share. Accern combs hundreds of millions of sources daily, most ignored by large search engines because they don’t generate enough traffic.

While it wasn’t easy taking classes by day and then running down to the office they had rented on Wall Street afterwards, Pandey said at the time, “Professors like Nasir Memon and Enrico Bertini have a way of inspiring you to great heights.”

Accern now works with a number of major hedge funds and has appeared on multiple industry watch lists of the “Top 150 Technology Startups” and “Global Hot Technology Startups.” And Pandey, as the editors of Forbes assert, “is augmenting Artificial Intelligence with indispensable human skills.”

Rafael García Aceves

Before coming to Brooklyn, García Aceves had coordinated a program on open government for the organization Transparency International Mexico, where he harnessed the power of big data to fuel citizen engagement and fight corruption. In mid-2017 he joined NYU Tandon's Governance Lab (GovLab) as a research fellow, helping to identify and share solutions to fight corruption in other emerging economies and contributing to a major report on the global impacts of open data. He’s now studying at the London School of Economics, in order, as Forbes reports, “to gain additional research tools to hold governments accountable.”