Jay Taneja is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, U.S.A. He develops and studies applications of sensing and communications technology on the measurement and management of infrastructure systems, with a focus on Africa.

He and his team have collaborated extensively with electricity utilities and other energy service companies in a number of African countries, producing machine learning-driven datasets and analyses that leverage data from satellites, Internet-of-Things platforms, and mobile phones.

He also leads the e-GUIDE Initiative, a multi-university collaboration that is focused on improving the use of data for planning and operations of electricity infrastructure in developing regions and is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Prior to joining UMass, he was a Research Scientist leading the Energy team at the IBM Research - Africa lab in Nairobi, Kenya, from 2013 to 2016. There, he focused on developing technology to improve electricity reliability and access in sub-Saharan Africa. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science at the University of California - Berkeley, where for his dissertation work, he built and studied supply-following electricity loads that change electricity consumption to match fluctuations of increasingly renewable electricity supplies.