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Agarwal is applying causal machine learning research to the most stressful job in software: finding the root cause of a production outage.
Anish Agarwal is co-founder and chief executive of Traversal, a New York company building AI site reliability agents that triage alerts and trace production incidents to their root cause.
A Research Career in Causal Machine Learning
Agarwal earned his PhD in computer science at MIT and focused his research on causal machine learning and synthetic data generation, according to Traversal. Before academia he worked at Boston Consulting Group, Amazon Core AI, and Microsoft Research, and he became a professor of operations research and computer science at Columbia University.
Leaving the Lab for a Startup
Having reached his goal of becoming a professor, he chose to take on a company anyway, betting that his research could help with one of the hardest statistical workflows in industry. He founded Traversal in 2023 with Raaz Dwivedi of Cornell Tech, Raj Agrawal, who also earned a computer science PhD at MIT, and Ahmed Lone, who brought trading experience and had been paged too many times for 3 a.m. incidents.
Taking on Noisy Production Data
Incident troubleshooting means sorting through huge volumes of noisy logs, metrics, and traces where every outage looks different. Traversal's agents search that telemetry and propose root causes for teams at customers such as DigitalOcean and Cloudways, with a bring-your-own-cloud option for regulated buyers.
Personal Life
Agarwal works between Traversal in New York and his faculty role at Columbia. Traversal describes him as someone who wanted to combine his love of research with turning technology into products.
