After a gap of almost four years, the Government has appointed Neelkanth Mishra, Chief Economist with Axis Bank, as part-time Chairman of UIDAI. He will be the second non-bureaucrat after Nandan Nilekani to chair the unique ID body. The Government has also filled two members’ posts with the appointment of Kotak Mahindra AMC head Neelesh Shah and IIT Delhi Professor Mausam.

“The Chairperson and the Members appointed under this Act shall hold office for a term of three years or up to the age of sixty-five years, whichever is earlier, from the date on which they assume office,” a gazette notification said. The Unique Identification Authority of India is responsible for issuance of the Unique Identity better known as ‘Aadhaar’.

Mishra, an engineer by education and an economist by vocation, is a well-known expert on the global economy. He joined Axis Bank in May this year, after spending over two decades at Credit Suisse. He is a gold medalist from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur. He graduated in computer science and engineering. He is also part of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India, and has been an advisor to several committees, including the 15th Finance Commission and the India Semiconductor Mission, according to Credit Suisse’s website.

Mausam is the founding head of the Yardi School of Artificial Intelligence, along with being a Professor of Computer Science at IIT Delhi. He is also an affiliate professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. With over 20 years of research experience in artificial intelligence, he has contributed to many research areas such as large-scale information extraction over the Web, AI approaches for optimising crowdsourced workflows, and probabilistic planning algorithms. More recently, his research is exploring neuro-symbolic machine learning, computer vision for radiology, NLP for robotics, multilingual NLP, and several threads in intelligent information systems that include information extraction, knowledge base completion, question answering, summarisation and dialogue systems. He has over 100 archival papers to his credit, along with a book, two best paper awards, and one test of time award.

Nilesh Shah is the Managing Director (MD) of Kotak Mahindra Asset Management Co. Ltd. He has over 31 years of experience in capital markets and has managed funds across equity, fixed income and real estate for local and global investors. In his previous assignments, Nilesh has held leadership roles with Axis Capital, ICICI Prudential AMC, Franklin Templeton AMC and ICICI Securities. He is a gold medallist Chartered Accountant and a merit ranking Cost Accountant. He is member of the COBOSAC committee of SEBI, Board Member of AMFI, and part-time member of EACPM.

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