EmTech India 2009 Speakers

Adi Godrej is Chairman of The Godrej Group. The Godrej Group is a mainly privately held, over a 100 year-old family conglomerate, with operations in India and several other countries. Adi Godrej has been president of several Indian trade and industrial bodies and associations. He is a member of the Governing Board of the Indian School of Business and a member of the National Council of the Confederation of Indian Industry.

Ajay Gupta is the Director of HP’s Imaging & Printing Group (IPG) R&D center in Bangalore India. IPG R&D center contribute to product and solution development for products ranging from smallest consumer printers to some of the most complex graphics print solution. Prior to joining IPG R&D center, Ajay led HP Labs India, the corporate research arm of Hewlett-Packard. Ajay has been involved with multiple key innovations in the telecoms arena that have spawned billion-dollar businesses for HP and Agilent.

Amit Varma heads the Strategy for HCL Security. He is responsible for making of Strategy, Strategic alliances, Merger and Acquisitions for HCL Security. Amit has an MBA (Finance) and an MS (Information Systems) from Boston University, USA. Amit has completed his Bachelors in Mathematics from Hans Raj College, Delhi University. Amit has worked in HCL for almost 4 years now in different functions of Merger and Acquisitions, Strategy.

Anand Gupta is Business Lead for Innovation at TCS. He did his Engineering degree in Computer Science from Pune University. He has over 14 yrs of experience in IT field in multiple Industry Verticals and has worked his way up performing various roles, from a code developer to his current position of architecting consultative solutions for Innovation Assets of TCS R&D and its TCS Co-Innovation Network (TM).

Aravind Sitaraman is Vice President & Managing Director of Cisco Development Organization, India. He is a computer scientist with over 23 years of work experience. After pioneering work in several startup companies and experience with US high-tech companies such as Novell Inc and Oracle Corporation, he became one of Cisco Systems’ leading inventors. He has 54 US patents to his name. He was the Co-Chairman of the Voice on DSL standard and Chairman of Auto-Configuration Forum in the global DSL Forum. He has presented several research papers in the DSL Forum, ATM Forum, and IETF.

Aruna is currently CEO, IL&FS where she is heading the national rural Common Service Centre project under the National E-Government Programme to provide e-services through a network of kiosks. A senior civil servant Aruna has held key administrative posts with the Union and Federal Governments in India Over the last decade, Aruna has been working in the area of Digital Inclusion and Access for the underserved, where she has pioneered several innovative e-governance, livelihoods and empowerment initiatives including Kerala’s acclaimed Digital literacy and Rajasthan’s financial access initiatives. She has also worked extensively on developing innovative and cost effective models for enhanced Digital Access and Services.

Ashish Gupta is currently pursuing Masters in Computer Applications from JIMS, Indraprastha University, Delhi. He is interested in exploiting modern technology to solve problems that affect the masses but are often ignored. After seeing multitudes hassle daily with taxi drivers over over-charging, Ashish has been working, for the past one year, on creating a practical, tamperproof, GPS-based fare meter for autorickshaws/taxis.

Atish Babu is Vice President, Nexus India Capital. Prior to Nexus, Atish has held several positions at highly successful technology start-ups and venture capital/private equity firms. He has spent significant time sourcing and evaluating early stage and growth investment opportunities in India and US at Edelweiss Capital and Battery Ventures. Atish is a mentor to a number of cross-border (Indo-US) entrepreneurs and students with new venture ideas.

Balvinder Singh Kalsi is the President and CEO of DuPont India and Chairman of the Board of Directors of E. I. DuPont India Private Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Wilmington, Delaware, USA-headquartered E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. Under his leadership DuPont India has emerged as one of the fastest growing strategic markets for DuPont globally. Kalsi is a Chartered Accountant from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and a member of the Institute of Company Secretaries of India. He is also a member of several industry associations.

Bharat Bhatia currently heads the Motorola’s Government Affairs and Public Policy activities for Asia. Motorola is a global Telecom, Broadcast and IT giant with over $30 billion in 2008 sales. Mr. Bhatia is an expert on spectrum management, Telecom & ICT regulations and policy issues and currently holds various industry positions. Prior to joining Motorola, Mr. Bhatia served the Govt. of India for 22 years where he held several positions in various government Ministries including the Ministry of Communications and Ministry of industry.

Bibhu Prasad Mishra is presently a final year student in the Department of Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering at IIT Kharagpur pursuing his B.Tech degree. In his junior years he was an HP Innovate winner for the innovative idea of image resizing. After completion of his junior year he went to Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai to work on Speech recognition. Till now he has co-authored two papers in prestigious IEEE Conferences. Presently he is working on topic of Real Time Speaker Identification.

Superannuated in January 1995 as the Special Director, Intelligence Bureau, D.C. Nath (IPS-1060) is currently the Executive President & CEO of the International Institute of Security and Safety Management (IISSM), headquartered in New Delhi, for the last over 12 year. Considered as a security ideologue, he is in demand from Corporate Houses for talking to senior business executives as also to organise customised training courses for their security personnel.

Debdutta Bhattacharya, an aspiring electronics graduate from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, takes interest in innovation and research. His work has been presented in conferences and he has novel RFIC circuit designs to his credit. He has an avid interest in innovation and has awards to his credit. As a winner of HP Innovate 2008 for introducing a novel method in image processing. He proposed a novel method to power villages which won at the Schneider Electric Innovation Challenge 2008.

Dr. Gupta is currently a professor in the Centre for Management in Agriculture at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He established the Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions (SRISTI, 1993) and Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network (GIAN, 1997), two NGOs to support the Honey Bee Network and to scale up and convert grassroots innovations into viable products respectively. Has also helped set up the National Innovation Foundation (NIF, 2000) by Department of Science and Technology, Government of India to make India innovative and creative society and a global leader in sustainable technologies

Dr. Arvind Lali is a Professor of Chemical Engineering, and Coordinator at DBT-ICT Centre of Energy Biosciences, Chemical Engineering Department, Institute of Chemical Technology (formerly UDCT). His teaching experience includes Bioprocess Technology, Adsorptive and Chromatographic Separations, Biochemical Engineering and core subjects in Chemical Engineering since 1985. He is also consultant and advisor to Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation, Japan in the area of adsorptive and chromatographic separations of APIs and biomolecules.

Dr. Shroff heads TCS’ Technology Innovation Lab in Delhi, which conducts applied research in software architecture, natural language processing, semantic computing, multimedia and computer vision. Additionally he is responsible for TCS’ Innovation Partner Network which works with emerging technology companies to create and take to market solutions that have disruptive innovation potential. As a member of TCS’ Corporate Technology Board, he is also involved in the process of recommending directions to existing R&D efforts, spawning new R&D efforts, sponsoring external research, and proliferating the resulting technology and intellectual property across TCS’ businesses.

Dr. Jaijit Bhattacharya is Adjunct Faculty at IIT Delhi, Country Director, Government Strategy at Sun Microsystems, and Vice President of Institute of Open Technology and Applications (IOTA), Government of West Bengal. He is responsible for the creation of the next generation of solutions for governments, based on open standards. Dr. Bhattacharya advises governments on e-governance strategies and has developed business models and strategies for leading companies in the IT, media and computer hardware industries.

Dr. Jawahar Malhotra is the CTO of Yahoo! India Research & Development, Bangalore and is responsible for building new technology platforms and architecting the technology roadmap for Yahoo! India R&D. Jawahar brings with him 20 years of industry experience, which includes leading the re-architecture, re-design and operations of high-scale web applications by the internet giant. He was one of the architects of the first server-side scripting engine (live wire) released by Netscape in 1996.

Kunal is an Applications Scientist in the Nanomeasurements division at Agilent Technologies. A materials scientist, Kunal graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur prior to completing his doctoral dissertation in nano-tribology from Southampton University, UK. He subsequently held post doctoral positions at Leeds University, UK and Columbia University, New York. Probing material properties at the micro-/nano- scale - from cells, tissues, soft gels to granular powders and ultra-hard wear resistant coatings – remained the focus of his interest during his academic years and his subsequent time with hi-tech instrumentation companies.

Dr. Lipika Dey is a senior scientist with the Innovation Labs of Tata Consultancy Services. Her area of specialization includes predictive analytics and unstructured data processing. She is actively involved in designing solutions for pro-actively extracting actionable intelligence from structured and unstructured enterprise data. Prior to joining TCS, Dr. Dey was a faculty member at Department of Mathematics, I.I.T., Delhi for 11 years. She has more than 40 publications in International and national journals and conferences.

Dr. Lokendra Shastri is General Manager – Research, and Head, Center for Knowledge Driven Information Systems, SETLabs, Infosys Technologies. Dr. Shastri has made significant contributions in the areas of scalable, parallel models of knowledge representation and inference, semantic networks, neural networks, and episodic memory. Dr. Shastri has served on the editorial boards of Connection Science and IEEE Expert, the advisory board of Human Cognitive Processing, and the program committees of several conferences on AI and Cognitive Science.

M. Balakrishnan is the Dean of Post Graduate Studies & Research at IIT Delhi. He is a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering from end of 1988 and his research interests are in the area of VLSI Design tools and Embedded Systems. He has guided six PhD theses, three MS theses and nearly hundred B.Tech. and M.Tech projects. He is one of the founders of a first faculty-student led TBIU startup named KritiKal Solutions Pvt. Ltd. which along with its subsidiary KritiKal SecureScan is emerging as a key technology developer in the security space.

Dr. Maharaj Kishan Bhan is Secretary to the Government of India, Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology. He has played a leadership role in promoting child health in India, and for developing countries through WHO, UNCIEF and other global think tanks. The role involved formulating policy, incorporating new biomedical research knowledge into programs, designing tools and instruments for training, program monitoring and guiding program delivery.

Dr. Prathap C. Reddy is the Founder Chairman of the Apollo Hospitals Group and the architect of modern Indian healthcare. Dr. Reddy received his premedical degree from the prestigious Madras Christian College and medical degree from Stanley Medical College, Chennai. Apollo today is the largest Integrated Healthcare Corporations in Asia, with Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Care, Telemedicine, Health IT, Project Consultancy, Clinical Research, Medical and Nursing Education, Pharmacy Retailing and Health Insurance.

Ramesh Raskar is an Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab, director of the Camera Culture research group and co-director of the Center for Future Storytelling. His research group focuses on developing tools to better capture and share the visual experience including novel cameras, medical devices and software platforms for visual media. In 2004, Raskar received the TR100 Award from Technology Review, which recognizes top young innovators under the age of 35, and in 2003, the Global Indus Technovator Award, instituted at MIT to recognize the top 20 Indian technology innovators worldwide.

Sanjoy Paul is currently Associate Vice President, General Manager-Research and Head of Convergence Lab at Infosys Technologies Limited where he heads research and innovation in the field of Communications, Media and Entertainment. Sanjoy has authored a book on Multicasting, published over 100 papers in International Journals and refereed Conference Proceedings, authored over 75 US patents out of which 25 are granted.

Shrikumar is currently the Director-General of the Association of Biotechnology Led Enterprises of India (ABLE), headquartered at Bangalore. His current appointments include an Adjunct Professorship at the Department of Biotechnology at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and a visiting faculty at the Department for Molecular Medicine at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden,. Shrikumar is the inventor of a patented novel Bioreactor which received the 2001 Biotechnology Process Development award of the government of India.

Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni is a Principal Researcher at Software Engineering and Technology Labs (SETLabs), the R&D arm of Infosys Technologies Limited. Dr. Srinivas specializes in Web services, Service Oriented Architecture, Business Process Management, and Grid technologies alongside pursuing interests in semantic web, autonomic computing, cloud computing, intelligent agents, and enterprise architecture. He has been selected for Who’s Who in Asia 2007 first edition, and Who is Who in the World 2009 editions.

Dr. Vikram Sheel Kumar is a physician-scientist and inventor who submitted his first patent to the USPTO at the age of 14. In 2002, Vikram co-founded Dimagi, a health informatics company that is the lead design firm behind a national health smart card program for Zambia with the US Center for Disease Control. He did his graduate research at the MIT Media Laboratory where he was a founding fellow of Media Lab Asia. He has won numerous honors including being named one of the top 100 innovators in the world by the MIT Technology Review and its Humanitarian of the Year.

Dr. Vinay Rai is an extraordinarily successful businessman who put the business world behind him and has moved on to become a prime-mover in higher-level education, a philosopher, and a philanthropist. He joined the family business after his years at MIT and diversified into steel production, computers and IT, mobile telecommunications, engineering, financial services, hotels, and more. In 2001, he set up the Rai Foundation and under that umbrella launched an educational institution that now has some 8,000 students on 14 campuses across India.

Dr Vinnie Jauhari is the Region Head - India for HP Labs Open Innovation Office. She is also the founding editor of the Journal of Services Research, which features in the EBSCO and PROQUEST databases. She has over 100 publications in National and International Journals and has also authored books such as Business Strategy, Services Management, Readings in Services Management, Global Case Studies in Hospitality Industry. Her area of expertise are Corporate Entrepreneurship, Strategic Management and Technology issues.

Dr. Vishy Poossala, Head of Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent India took over the reins of the company in July 2008. His prime responsibilities as the head of the Bell Labs India is to grow the lab in charter and size, create innovations in the networking and applications space, especially for emerging markets like India and support ALU’s business activities in India. Dr Poosala is a man with a great vision, as he anticipates that the 3G technology will quickly become affordable and will be supported by large number of India-specific applications.

As editor in chief, Jason Pontin is responsible for the editorial direction of the award-winning magazine Technology Review and TechnologyReview.com. Pontin took on the role of publisher in September 2005, overseeing all aspects of the company’s growth strategy, which includes a rapidly expanding website, specialty e-newsletters, an aggressive international expansion, and signature events, such as the annual Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT. He has written for many national and international publications, including The New York Times, The Economist, The Financial Times, Wired, and The Believer.

Kartik is the co-founder of iTrust Financial Advisors, a financial supermarket that is using technology to build an open architecture distributor of financial products. Previously, he invested money for the Ziff family and at Europe’s leading hedge fund, TCI Fund Management. Before investing, Kartik worked as a mergers and acquisitions banker at James D. Wolfensohn, Inc. Kartik has also managed the operations for India’s largest theatre company, Stagedoor, and acted in 11 productions.

Kundan Kumar is a BTech student of the Electronics department of IIT Kharagpur. He is a final year student and as a student has remarkable innovations in circuit design to his credit in the area of new generation Network-on-Chips. He has been part of the winning team of HP Innovate 2008 and has received accolades for his contribution to the new method for image resizing. He has co-authored a paper published in “2008 IEEE Conference on Soft Computing in Industrial Applications”.

Kunwer Sachdev is the prime moving force behind Su-Kam’s evolution into a top-of-its-class company. Kunwer has never settled for the beaten path. At the young age of 20 and without any financial backing, he started a cable business and made a success of it. Soon, however, he switched to making inverters, an almost uncharted territory at that time. His entrepreneurial vision put Su-Kam on a strong growth trajectory in a relatively short period of time. Driven by the desire to innovate, Kunwer continues to be closely involved with the research and development, production, strategic marketing, business operations and advertising for the company.

Manish Gupta is the Associate Director at the IBM India Research Laboratory. In various technical and senior management positions he has held at IBM India and at the T. J. Watson Research Center, Manish has led efforts to develop breakthrough technologies in India and has led research on system software for the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer and other Deep Computing platforms. He has co-authored over 70 papers in the areas of high performance compilers, parallel computing, and Java Virtual Machine optimizations, and has filed sixteen patents.

Mehul Shah is Group Chief Architect & CIO - Telemedia (Voice, Broadband & Media) Services at Bharti Airtel. He has 19 years of experience working for Telecommunication Companies in IT and Network Management. Prior to Airtel, he has worked for Verizon Communications, Qwest Communications, Time Warner, CSC and AT&T Bell Labs. In 2008, Mehul was the finalist for “CIO of the Year” award by CIO Strategies, India.

Neelam Dhawan is the Managing Director of Hewlett-Packard India. She has countrywide responsibility for revenues and profitability and ensuring the greatest leverage from HP’s Services, Personal Systems and Imaging & Printing businesses. With a portfolio that extends to offshore activities, BPO, Software Engineering, Research and IT Services, Neelam is focused on shaping the company’s overall business agenda and leading its strategy and corporate development efforts to make HP the most admired company in India.

Niyam Bhushan is an independent Technology Editor. He writes for the Mint newspaper, and participates in video-interviews on livemint.com. Niyam is a Contributing Editor and Columnist to LinuxForYou. He has also been the Editor of Benefit, an IT magazine for SMB; Executive Editor and CEO of CHIP Magazine; Editor, PCWorld India, Contributing Editor, MacWorld India, and a Contributor and Columnist for Hindustan Times newspaper

Pramod Chaudhari is Chairman, Praj Industries Ltd. and Praj Group. As founder of Praj, Pramod has always sought challenging opportunities. He believes green energy and climate change mitigation technologies will provide sustainability for business and the environment. Pramod is a Member of Committee on Development of Biofuels – Planning Commission, Government of India and is also actively involved with CII.

Pramod Mulay is a Senior Manager at EMC’s India Center of Excellence (COE), Bangalore. With over 12 years of experience in the IT industry, Pramod has deep expertise in the areas of Interactive Content Management and Web 2.0. Some Web 2.0 enabled products developed by the Pramod led Interactive Content Management group are incorporating thoughts like blogs, wikis, ratings, feedback as the integral part of their products. On the Web Content Management side, they are creating infrastructure that allows enterprises to display forms to collect product rating and feedback from its customers.

Pranjal Sharma is Executive Editor at UTVi. In his 18-year long career as an economic journalist, Pranjal Sharma has been involved with various aspects of the media. He has previously worked with English newspapers, magazines, and news channels and has presented, produced and directed business news shows in English and Hindi. Pranjal has been a recipient of the News Television Award 2007 for Best Business Show and Best Business News Anchor in Hindi.

Priyank Garg is Director of Product Management at Yahoo! India. He is leading Product Management efforts for the Yahoo! Search team based out of Bangalore. Before this, he was in the Silicon Valley for the last 4 years as the lead Product Manager for Yahoo! Search Technologies, the search engine that powers Yahoo! With Yahoo!, he has introduced many new products successfully to the market, including Site Explorer and SearchScan and has been an advocate of opening up the Yahoo! Search index to the community at large through his efforts.

Professor M.G.K. Menon is presently Advisor in the Department of Space/Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and President, India International Center, New Delhi. He was Member of the Planning Commission with the rank of Minister of State (1982-1989); Scientific Adviser to the Prime Minister (1986-1989) and Chairman of the Science Advisory Committee to the Cabinet (1982-1985); Minister for Science & Technology, as also for Education in the Government of India; Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha) during 1990-96.

Prof. Vijay Chandru is an academic entrepreneur who was named in the list of 50 Pioneers of Change by India Today in 2008. He is the founder of Strand Life Sciences, a computational biology company which is considered a pioneer in discovery research informatics. He currently serves as Chairman & CEO of Strand. Professor Chandru was also the founder of PicoPeta Simputers (7 hottest startups in Technology Review - September 2001), a company that commercialized the Simputer and brought it to market as the Amida.

Raghu Raman is the CEO of Mahindra Special Services Group, one of the leading companies providing corporate risk mitigation services. MSSG was founded with intent to provide high-end ‘Special’ consulting services with skill sets previously available perhaps only to the armed forces. During his 10 year stint with the forces he spent time battling counter-insurgency in Punjab and leading troops in active operations in Siachen Glacier. Raghu Raman is considered an authority on Information Risk Management and Counter-Intelligence.

Rahul Gupta is currently pursuing Masters in Computer Applications from JIMS, Indraprastha University, Delhi. He is interested in exploiting modern technology to solve problems that affect the masses but are often ignored. After seeing multitudes hassle daily with taxi drivers over over-charging, Rahul has been working, for the past one year, on creating a practical, tamperproof, GPS-based fare meter for autorickshaws/taxis.

Rajeev Mantri is executive director at Navam Capital, a private investment firm focused on venture investments in energy, nanotechnology and advanced materials. Rajeev holds a degree in materials science and engineering from Northwestern University, USA, and also conducted cutting-edge scientific research in nanotechnology, working specifically on alloy strengthening using nanoparticles. Since 2006, he has been an editor for the Forbes/Wolfe Emerging Tech Report, the Forbes Group’s only publication focused on disruptive technologies.

Rajeev Rastogi is the Vice President and Head of Yahoo! Labs in Bangalore where he directs basic and applied research in the areas of Web search, advertising, and cloud computing. Previously Rajeev was a Bell Labs Fellow and the founding Director of the Bell Labs Research Center in Bangalore, India. Rajeev is active in the fields of databases, data mining, and networking, and has served on the program committees of several conferences in these areas. He currently serves on the editorial board of the CACM, and has been an Associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering in the past.

Rajesh Kunnath is the co-founder of LED 2.0. LED 2.0 was founded to enable the best technology in lighting to be affordable for most people. He is also the founder of Silicon Seva. Silicon Seva provides consulting and product design services in the embedded space. Prior to this, Rajesh Kunnath served as the design head of the Indian subsidiary of Mini-Circuits, a world-leader in RF/Wireless components.

Ravi is the chairman of K&P group in addition to KPIT Cummins, which includes Kirtane & Pandit Chartered Accountants, K&P Corporate Solutions, a firm engaged in consulting and stock options and KP consulting that specializes in balance score card and activity based management. From his accounting roots, Ravi, along with his team, has built a global IT, Engineering & BPO Services Company with leadership in sharply defined focus areas.

Sanjay Swamy, a Silicon Valley veteran, is the Chief Executive Officer at mChek, responsible for the entire operations of the company and scaling mChek to support customers across the globe. During his 12-year stint in the Silicon Valley, Sanjay had also held various senior positions in marketing and business development in Portal Software, Xerox PARC, and Integrated Systems (now Wind River).

Sateesh Andra is a Venture Partner with Draper Fisher Jurvetson India. He is currently on the board of directors at MetroMela, mGinger and Pressmart, and is a board observer for Cleartrip. With hands-on start-up experience and in-depth knowledge of the dynamics of VC funding, he has effectively leveraged India to create technology products for global markets. Sateesh holds U.S. patents in Communications and Networking.

Satish Jha is the President & CEO, One Laptop per Child, India. He is a social entrepreneur and a global executive in information technology and healthcare management. He has been noted for his work in the area of using information technologies for development and has been a key contributor to this movement. He also co-chairs the World Information Technology Forum. Several projects initiated, co-founded and supported by him have been awarded or nominated for awards internationally.

Srikanth is the Founder and CEO of Tuple Technologies Pvt. Ltd., a business analytics firm. He has 12+ years of experience in data mining, text mining and web mining technologies. He has a passion for analytics and has worked as both a practitioner as well as researcher in this field. He has a well-rounded, global, experience in senior management roles, management consulting and venture capital firm, where he was entrepreneur-in-residence. His core expertise is in building and deploying predictive models and ensuring these are aligned to the business context.

Sriram Bharatam is the CEO and Founder of Iridium Interactive, one of India’s leading Internet consulting firms. Known for creativity and innovation, he is currently spearheading the Web Accessibility initiative i.e. making the web sites accessible for visually challenged in India. An avid believer of the power of Online Communities, he used the power of internet to raise US$1.5 million for Cyclone victims of Orissa & build a global community of 18 million in just 45 days through Cause an Effect foundation. This effort led him to win the world’s prestigious Kauffman Community Award for ‘Social Entrepreneurship’ in the year 2004.

Tarun heads The Perfect Future, an organization dedicated to bringing technology innovation in the areas of healthcare, education and mobile platforms to the emerging markets. Tarun is an avid technology enthusiast. Tarun worked for Microsoft from 1995-2004. During his tenure, he architected key products like Windows NT, COM+, and most recently the .NET Framework. He was awarded the “Worldwide Software Architect of the Year, 2003? for his work at Microsoft.

Mr. Venkatesh Valluri is the President and Country General Manager, Agilent Technologies, India. Mr. Valluri’s responsibilities include establishing growth strategies for Agilent in India and also expanding its captive operations. Agilent’s captive operations in India span a wide range of high value added activities that include cutting edge research and development work, Engineering & IT services, global business support and financial services for the global operations of the company.

Venki is responsible for product and technology strategy at Rediff.com, and also oversees fee-based businesses and the engineering and network operations. As part of his responsibilities, Venki mentors and manages relationships with a variety of technology and solution partners around the country. Over the past few years, Rediff.com has built its computing, hosting service delivery infrastructure entirely in India, with active collaboration with the major Internet service providers.

Vinay Gidwaney was a co-founder of Control-F1 and grew the company into an industry leader in Support Automation. In 2002, Gidwaney was a winner of the prestigious MIT Technology Review Top 100 Innovators under 35 award. Gidwaney was a primary investor and co-founder of Neurosilicon. Neurosilicon develops novel braincomputing interfaces to expand the scientific understanding of the human brain. In early 2008, Gidwaney was invited to become a visiting researcher in the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at MIT Media Lab.