Know our people - Kavitark Ram Shriram

Kavitark Ram Shriram is the founding board member of Google and one of the first investors in Google.

He earlier served as an officer of Amazon.com working for Jeff Bezos, founder & CEO. Ram came to Amazon.com in August, 1998, when Amazon acquired Junglee, an online comparison shopping firm of which Ram was president. While at Amazon, Ram helped grow the customer base during its early high growth phase in 1998/1999.

Before Junglee and Amazon, Ram was a member of the Netscape executive team, joining them in 1994, before they shipped products or posted revenue.Kavitark Shriram ranked 583 at Forbes worlds list of billionaires 2007 and ranked 677 on 2008.

Ram is an MBA graduate of the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, also Bachelor of Science Degree from University of Madras and a founding board member of Google and 247customer.com. Ram also serves on the boards of Plaxo, Zazzle and PodShow. Ram also serves on the advisory board of Naukri.com, a leading classifieds site in India which has leading marketplaces in jobs, matrimony and real estate serving the Indian market.

Shriram said there is no magic formula to success. Rather, it comes from continual small ``block and tackle moves. Oh, and it helps to have a little book called ``Ram's Book of Mistakes to guide the way.He currently owns 3.4 million shares of Google.

Know our people - Sukanya Krishnan

Sukanya Krishnan (born August 2, 1975) is an Indian-born American news anchor for the 7-9 am segments of the CW 11 Morning News on WPIX in New York City, paired with John Muller.

In 2006, Krishnan won her first Emmy for On-Camera Achievement (News Anchor/Host) from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS). She was the first Indian American woman to work in the New York market at a local network affiliate.

Born in Madras, India (now Chennai), Krishnan grew up on Staten Island and attended New Dorp High School, where amongst her classmates was Wu Tang Clan member, Method Man. In 1993 she graduated from Dickinson College with a bachelor's degree in Spanish, and as president of the senior class.In addition to her Emmy Award, Krishnan has also won the Project Impact (formerly Indian American Political Awareness Committee)'s "Creating A Voice" Award, and a Distinguished Broadcast Journalist commendation from the Office of the Comptroller of the City of New York, for her work covering the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Her community volunteering includes being a celebrity judge for the 2005 Iron Skillet Cookoff.

In March 2004, Krishnan played a reporter covering the mob on the "Two Tonys" episode of HBO's The Sopranos.In July 2006, she was honored at the FeTNA (Federation of Tamil Sangams of North America) annual convention held in New York City. On October 9, 2007, Krishnan was named one of the 2007 Power Women by New York Moves Magazine, at an awards ceremony hosted by Academy Award-winning actress Mira Sorvino and MC'd by comedian Judy Gold.

Krishnan is fluent in Tamil, Spanish and English. On the CW11 Morning News of September 17, 2007, she announced her marriage to Eric Schroeder; she lives with her husband in Manhattan.

Know our people - Raj Rajaratnam

Raj Rajaratnam is the Founder and Managing General Partner of The Galleon Group. He is a SriLankan born Tamilian. The Galleon Group manages over $5 billion, making it one of the largest hedge funds in the world.Prior to founding Galleon, Mr. Rajaratnam was President and Chief Operating Officer of Needham & Company, an investment bank focused on the technology and healthcare industries.

He joined Needham in 1985 as an analyst in the electronics sector and became Managing Director of Investment Research in 1987. In 1989 he became Chief Operating Officer, and in 1991 was appointed President.Prior to joining the Needham & Company, Mr. Rajaratnam was a lending officer in the High Technology Group at Chase Manhattan Bank. He holds an MBA in Finance from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Know our people - Kumar Mahadeva

Kumar Mahadeva is the founder, chairman, and Former CEO of Cognizant Technology Solutions (Nasdaq: CTSH), who was born in Sri Lanka and held positions with the BBC, McKinsey, AT&T, and Dun & Bradstreet before founding Cognizant — originally a joint venture with Dun & Bradstreet — in 1994.

Cognizant provides application outsourcing services and 24/7 software project management for a small but intensely loyal client base of large U.S. and European companies. Widely praised in the business press for its innovation and growth, the company reached $229.1 million in revenues in 2002, and has a market cap of $1.7 billion. In the most recent quarter, revenues increased 60 percent.

Based in Teaneck, New Jersey, Cognizant has established twelve software development centers across India. “Most U.S. companies approach overseas markets primarily as places to sell their goods,” he observes. “What’s different about our business model is that we’ve leveraged the global talent pool, kept our costs low, and stayed on top of new technologies that can benefit our clients.”

Mahadeva enjoys being an entrepreneur and is excited about the innovative possibilities of Internet technology. “With the Internet, one can collaborate with people halfway around the world throughout the entire business process,” he notes. “That’s one key area we’re focusing on for the future.”

Know our people - Swamy Kandan

Swamy Kandan, an Indian and present resident in Philadelphia, USA, made his first feature film Catch Your Mind. He completed a professional course on Film Making from New York University and made a short film called Secondary Impacts based on Sept 11 Attacks. He is presently planning a thriller which is in pre-production stage. His Catch Your Mind is scheduled to hit the theaters in US on 19th September. The following is what Swamy Kandan has to say about his film.

“Catch Your Mind,” an independent family drama expected to motivate teens to find comfort in their loved ones and in exciting new venues like science and technology, opens Sept. 19, 2008 in select theaters in the U.S. and Canada.

Making of Catch Your Mind
Robotics, the science and technology of robots, serves as the backdrop to a film about searching for the self-confidence and life skills it takes to survive adolescence. A story about peer pressure, young love and teenage angst, “Catch Your Mind” is a must-see movie any teen or parent can relate to.
The film’s main character, Bruce, is an excellent student who was raised in a loving home. But somewhere in the middle of his search for self identity, Bruce falls into the wrong crowd and quickly finds his world has turned upside down. After Bruce loses interest in academics and falls into a self-destructive pattern of underage drinking, his mother and his childhood friend recognize his struggles and entice him to join his high school’s NASA sponsored robotics team. Then everything changes.
“Catch Your Mind” explores emotional conflict, trust and betrayal between a teenage boy and his mom. According to Alan Ostrow and Cathy Beck, high school robotics mentors who helped out with the film, the role robotics plays in the plot is anything but fictional.
Robots lined up for “action”“We’ve had a lot of kids come in, confused about where they are in life,” Ostrow said. “More than [robotics] itself, they find a place where they belong.”
This movie depicts that very world, in which a teenager finally feels at home in a place where his family, friends and mentors are his biggest supporters, and anything is possible because science and technology are celebrated.

About Swamy Kandan, Writer/Director

To maintain accuracy in the film, Kandan recruited high school robotics teams and their mentors as technical advisors. He also brought in a NASA Goddard Space Flight Center contractor and robotics field supervisor who supplied a robotics field. Real life robotics enthusiasts offered their expertise and their machines to create a competition atmosphere for filming in the Philadelphia suburbs.

Swamy Kandan is an independent filmmaker living in Blue Bell, Pa. He holds masters degrees in electronics and management and learned filmmaking at New York University. “Catch Your Mind,” Kandan’s first feature film as writer, director and producer, was inspired by his teenage son’s involvement in competitive high school robotics. This film is produced by Blossom Pictures LLC, a Philadelphia-based company that produces and distributes independent films for the international market.

For distribution information or to schedule an interview, e-mail info@sddigitalcreation.com or visit www.catchyourmind.com.

Know our people - Krishna Bharat

Krishna Bharat is a Principal Scientist at Google who is famous for creating Google News (http://news.google.com/). This service can automatically index about 4500 news websites around the world and provide a summary of the News resources. Officially his title is "Principal Research Scientist".

GVU alumni Bharat received his PhD in 1996 on Human Computer Interaction under Scott Hudson. During his Phd work at Tech he also worked on a newspaper project called Krakatoa Chronicle. This was to lay the ground work for his later innovations at Google. The Krakatoa Chronicle was an interactive, personalized newspaper implemented completely in Java, which was in its infancy at that time. “In the display of the newspaper I tried hard to make it look like a print newspaper rather than what you’d see online. So we had neatly justified, Times-Roman text in multiple columns and it looked a lot like real newspaper. Additionally it was interactive and you could give feedback. You could say whether you liked an article or not, and the newspaper would learn what your interests were. Over time the selection and ranking of stories would adapt to your taste. This project introduced me to the world of online news and personalization, and also gave me a crash course in information retrieval (the science of search) and personalization,” said Bharat. Google news is the outcome of a project that Dr. Bharat started in late 2001 and for which he has been in a leadership role ever since. The service is a computer compiled news-site where all news that appears on the web is automatically detected, organized by story for easy browsing, ranked by worldwide interest, and indexed so that it can be searched on Google. This allows for users to quickly and efficiently access relevant news as soon as it is posted on the web. “How the product was created is interesting. There was an increase in news reading activity nationwide, and possibly worldwide, soon after the September 11th attacks. I too was one of the many seeking news all over the web. I realized that given how the web was organized it was extremely difficult for readers to get a full understanding of what’s being published on any given topic in the news. Even though all the articles are present on the web, they’re so fresh that they have yet to be linked to from other web sites. I wondered whether it would be useful if someone were to group all articles reporting on a story in real time so that a reader could get to all of them very quickly. “The project seemed compatible with Google’s core mission. Google’s aim is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. I felt that organizing the world’s news output by topic and making it available for readers to search and browse would be a useful thing to do,” said Bharat when asked about the inspiration behind Google news. “Google News now has 41 editions, in 18 languages and users worldwide. The product has a loyal user base, and our users on average read news from multiple newspapers for each story they care about. This I believe makes them better educated than the average newspaper reader. We also have a mobile version for people on the go, as well as a news alerts service to deliver news over email. “We recently integrated news videos hosted on YouTube and added the ability for people mentioned in a news story to contribute their own narrative to the mix. This is a truly innovative idea and permits the actors in the news event to communicate directly with the public,” added Bharat. Video from the Symposium Bharat has also earned a joint patent with Google on the Hilltop algorithm. The algorithm is an essential part of how Google search works.

Know our people - Arogyaswami Paulraj

Prof. Arogyaswami Paulraj was born in Coimbatore, India. He joined the Indian Navy at age 15 through the National Defence Academy, Kharakvalsa and served the Navy for 30 years. He is currently a Professor at the Dept. of Elect. Engineering, Stanford University. Paulraj is the pioneer of a break through wireless technology known as MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) that dramatically increases performance of wireless systems, MIMO is now the core technology in latest WiFi and WIMAX systems.

Paulraj served in India till 1991 where he is known for pioneering the development of military sonars (APSOH0 family. Paulraj also served as the founding director for three major labs in India - CAIR ([Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics]), CDAC (Center for Development of Advanced Computing), and CRL (Central Research Labs of Bharat Electronics). He has won over a dozen defense and national awards in India. He is also a fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering.

After joining Stanford University in 1992, he created a new field of smart antennas and MIMO wireless. He has published 2 text books, over 350 research papers and is a co-inventor on 30 US patents. He has won a number of awards including the IEEE Technical Achievement award and is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering.

He founded Iospan Wireless in 1999 to develop MIMO-OFDMA technology and the company was later was acquired by Intel Corp. in 2003. He also co-founded Spectrum Infotech Ltd. in Bangalore which was acquired by L&T in 2006. In 2004 he co-founded Beceem Communications Inc., a company dealing in WIMAX wireless chip technology.

Paulraj sits on several university, company and advisory boards in US and in India. He is married to Nirmala Paulraj, and has two daughters.