Dr. Ramakrishnan Srikant
Dr. Ramakrishnan Srikant is a Google Fellow responsible for Search Ads Quality and User Experience. His research interests include data mining, online advertising, and user modeling. Prior to joining Google, he was part of the Intelligent Information Systems Research department at IBM Almaden Research Center. He completed his B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Madras in 1990.
Dr. Srikant has published more than 30 research papers that have been extensively cited, and has been granted 25 patents.
Dr. Srikant received the 2002 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for his work on mining association rules, the ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award (2006) for his work on mining association rules and privacy-preserving data mining, the VLDB 2004 Ten Year Best Paper Award, the ICDE 2008 Influential Paper Award, the SIGMOD 2014 Test of Time Award, and the EDBT 2017 Test of Time Award.
Dr. Srikant served as Program Co-Chair of SIGKDD 2001 and PAKDD 2004, Vice Chair of WWW 2006 and ICDM 2004, and Deputy Chair of WWW 2004. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of SIGKDD Explorations.
Mr. Arvind Nithrakashyap
Shri Arvind Nithrakashyap received his Bachelor’s in Computer Science from IIT Madras in 1995, followed by a Master’s in CS from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1997. He has over 20 years of experience building storage, databases, and distributed systems. He is currently the Co-founder and CTO of Rubrik, one of the fastest-growing Unicorn startups in the enterprise.
He has demonstrated extensive technical expertise and phenomenal execution throughout his career. At Oracle, he architected and built some of the foundational pieces of infrastructure, such as distributed caching, recovery, transaction management, and storage. He even co-founded Oracle Exadata, the company’s flagship database system and one of Oracle’s core storage platforms today. At RocketFuel, he architected and built their engine supporting the core business use case; the real-time bidding engine had to be highly scalable, reliable, and respond to ad candidates extremely fast. He led a team of 30 engineers and helped build a large-scale ad platform to handle 50 billion daily requests with 50-60 millisecond latency.
Rajesh Jha
Shri Rajesh Jha received his Bachelor’s in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 1988 and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1990. He serves on the Advisory Board for the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the Jagran Foundation in Bellevue, Washington. He holds multiple patents from his early days as a software engineer.
Shri Jha joined Microsoft in 1990, developing multiple product releases with the Microsoft Works team. He moved on to create multimedia technologies in the Consumer Division and, as a Director of Development, worked for several years developing early versions of cloud-delivered services. Continuing his company’s success path, Mr. Jha became the Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft Outlook. He oversaw the early planning, subsequent execution, and scale-out of the cloud-based commercial services that grew into Microsoft Office 365.
Prof. S. Sudarshan
Prof. S. Sudarshan received his B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Madras in 1987 and completed his Ph.D. from the Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1992. After working for three years at AT&T Bell Laboratories, NJ, USA, he joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay in 1995, where he is the current Subrao M. Nilekani Chair Professor. He was the Head of the Department from 2013-2016. He has built various software systems, one of which is used in many telephone switches manufactured by Lucent USA. He is a co-author of the internationally best-selling textbook “Database System Concepts,” which is now in its 6th edition and has been translated into four languages.
His research contributions in the areas of query optimization and keyword search on semi-structured data are highly cited and have earned him the “Influential Paper Award” at the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) 2012, one of the top 4 conferences in the area of database systems, as well as the Best Paper award at COMAD 2012. His work has been recognized through several awards and accolades, including the IBM Faculty Award in 2001 and 2006 and the Bell Labs President’s Silver Award in 1999.
Dr. Aravind Srinivasan
Dr. Aravind Srinivasan graduated with a B.Tech. Degree in Computer Science from IIT Madras in 1989 before completing an M.S. and Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1993. Ever since, he has pushed the field’s boundaries with his work in probabilistic methods, algorithms, and networks. With its roots in fundamental research, his work has increasingly shifted to the use of computing in the service of society. In the years following his Ph.D., he has held various positions, including with the Institute of Advanced Study (Princeton, USA), the National University of Singapore (Singapore), and, more recently, the University of Maryland (Maryland, USA). He also served a brief stint as a Member of the Technical Staff in the Mathematics of Networks and Systems Research Department of Bell Laboratories between 1998 and 2001, filing several patents related to innovation in network algorithms.
He has held visiting positions at various institutions including IIT Madras, MIT and Cornell (USA), Max-Planck Institute (Germany), University of Melbourne (Australia), University of Venice (Italy), Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) and Center for Mathematics and Computer Science (Netherlands). With over 175 papers in various forms including refereed journals and conferences, book chapters and invited articles, his mastery in the ever-evolving field of Computer Science is unquestionable. He has been named an ACM Fellow, AAAS Fellow, and IEEE Fellow in recognition of his contribution to research in the field. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the ‘ACM Transactions of Algorithms’ (TALG), Managing Editor of ‘Theory of Computing’, and an Associate Editor of ‘Networks’.