Awards Jury

IT Secretary, Government of Karnataka

M N Vidyashankar took over as the IT Secretary of Karnataka in October 2006. Besides IT, Vidyashankar also holds the post of Secretary for Biotechnology, and Science and Technology. While at Bangalore Development Authority, he was instrumental in implanting the e-Pragathi project aimed at creating multi-utility kiosks across the city for the payment of utility bills.

Associate Director, Indian Institute of Science (IISc)

Prof. N. Balakrishnan is currently the Associate Director of the Indian Institute of Science and a Professor at the Department of Aerospace Engineering and at the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre. His areas of research where he has over 230 publications in the international journals and international conferences, include Numerical Electromagnetics, High Performance Computing and Networks, Polarimetric Radars and Aerospace Electronic Systems, Information Security, Digital Library and Speech processing.

He has received many awards including the Padmashree by the President of India, 2002, J C Bose National Fellow, 2007, Homi J. Bhabha Award for Applied Sciences, 2004 and the Alumni Award for excellence in Research for Science & Engineering by IISc, 2001. He is a Fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy (currently the Vice President), Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Sciences and Institution of Electronics & Telecommunication Engineers.

President, IEEE Computer Society

Rangachar Kasturi received his BE (Electrical) degree from Bangalore University, India in 1968 and MSEE and Ph.D. degrees from Texas Tech University in 1980 and 1982, respectively. He was a professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University during 1982-2003 and was a Fulbright Scholar during 1999. Dr. Kasturi has been elected to serve as the 2008 President of the IEEE Computer Society. He was the President of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) during 2002-04. He has served as the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and the Machine Vision and Applications journals. Dr. Kasturi is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of IAPR. He has received the Penn State Engineering Society Premier Research Award and has been inducted into the Texas Tech Electrical Engineering Academy. His research interests are in computer vision and pattern recognition. He is an author of the textbook, Machine Vision, and has published numerous papers and research reference books. He has directed many research projects in document image analysis, video sequence analysis and biometrics. In particular, he is directing a project that evaluates research progress in detection and tracking of faces, people, text, and vehicles in video sequences.

Vice President, Server Technologies, Oracle Corporation

Vijay joined Oracle in 2006 as Vice President of Engineering. As Vice President, Vijay leads the Fusion Middleware organization in India that delivers cutting edge innovations across the Fusion Middleware stack including the JDeveloper/ADF developer tool, SOA Suite, Identity Management, Business Intelligence, WebCenter, Content Management and related technologies. In addition, Vijay is also the operational head for the Server Technologies division in India that includes the Oracle Database, Enterprise Manager and Fusion Middleware Development teams.

Vijay has over 20 years of software product development experience in the US and India. Prior to his tenure at Oracle, Vijay was a Vice President and head of Sun Microsystems’ India Engineering Center in Bangalore, Sun’s largest center outside the San Francisco Bay Area. Earlier, he held various engineering roles at Sun Microsystems, NetDynamics, IBM Corporation and Transarc Corporation in the US.

Managing Director, SAP Labs India

Since Oct 1st 2007, Kush Desai is the Managing Director of SAP Labs India. In this capacity, Kush is the legal representative for SAP Labs India and is responsible for delivering operational services. Additionally, he is also a key member of the global SAP Labs network. During his six years at SAP, Kush has earned a reputation for delivering stakeholder value to the organization through his strategic contributions to almost all areas of operations. His deep industry insight and experience make him an invaluable member of the organization.

Prior to joining SAP, Kush held key positions in some of the renowned financial services firms, start-ups and manufacturing majors. A qualified Chartered Accountant since 1994 and with 13 years experience in the field of Finance, Kush has all along been the promoter of and benchmark for high performance and integrity.

Head, Google India R&D

Prasad Ram, also known as Prasad Bhaarat Ram is the head of Research and Development at Google India. He had previously worked as a Chief Technology Officer at Yahoo and Dynamx Technologies and as Research Scientist at Xerox Parc. He holds a B. Tech, Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Mumbai and Ph.D., Computer Science from UCLA.

Senior Executive, Accenture Technology Labs India

Dr. Lin L. Chase heads Accenture Technology Labs India in Bangalore. Chase was selected to head the new India lab in December 2005, just nine months after joining Accenture as a systems integration researcher in Palo Alto. There she focused on semantic data integration, business process modeling and service-oriented architecture.

Chase has worked across Europe in a variety of technology jobs, including launching the European division of an American startup software company called SpeechWorks International. In 2002, she moved to the San Francisco Bay area and founded NeoSpeech after a South Korean speech technology company called Voiceware offered her $2 million in seed money to start her own business. Prior to Accenture, Chase's career centered on artificial intelligence (AI) and speech technologies.

Vice President & Head, SETLabs, Infosys Technologies

Subu Goparaju is Vice President and Head of Software Engineering and Technology Labs (SETLabs), the Center for Technology Research and Innovation at Infosys and Microsoft Technology Center (MTC), which is responsible for building new services and solutions on MS platform. He also heads the company’s IP Cell (Intellectual Property Cell) which is responsible for protecting and exploiting company’s intellectual property. Subu received a Bachelor of Engineering (BE) degree from Mangalore University (KREC, now NIT-Suratkal) in Electrical and Electronics in 1988.

General Manager, DPE, Microsoft India

Tarun Gulati is the General Manager for Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) at Microsoft India and a part of the India Leadership Team. In this role, Tarun is responsible for spearheading Microsoft India’s efforts to foster the Indian software ecosystem through deep strategic engagements with developers, IT professionals, students, academia and software and services organizations. His strategic goal is to drive increased developer & IT Professional satisfaction, accelerate broad market adoption of Microsoft technologies and win the enterprise development platform.

Prior to this role, Tarun was based in Microsoft US where he was General Manager - National Platform Evangelism and Technical Sales. In this role, he led a community of 1400 technical and specialist people supporting a $10 billion revenue stream and drove the company’s DPE, Specialist Team Unit (STU), Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) and security initiative s. During his tenure in Microsoft’s largest subsidiary, Tarun has done commendable work to improve the overall efficiencies within the developer, IT Pro and partner communities - leveraging synergies in leadership development, training, readiness, systems, and processes.

IBM India Chief Scientist

Dr. C. Mohan joined IBM Almaden Research Center in 1981 where he worked until May 2006 on a number of topics in the areas of database, workflow and transaction management. From June 2006, he has been working as the IBM India Chief Scientist, based in Bangalore, with responsibilities that relate to serving as the executive technical leader of IBM India within and outside IBM. Mohan is the primary inventor of the ARIES family of recovery and concurrency control methods, and the industry-standard Presumed Abort commit protocol. He was named an IBM Fellow, IBM's highest technical position, in 1997 for being recognized worldwide as a leading innovator in transaction management. He received the 1996 ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award in recognition of his innovative contributions to the development and use of database systems. In 2002, he was named an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. At the 1999 International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, he was honored with the 10 Year Best Paper Award for the widespread commercial and research impact of his ARIES work which has been widely covered in textbooks and university courses. From IBM, he has received 2 Corporate and 8 Outstanding Innovation/Technical Achievement Awards. He is an inventor on 34 patents and was named an IBM Master Inventor in 1997.

Head of SOA Competency/Integrator, Satyam

Srini Kumar is Assoc Vice President and Head of SOA Practice at Satyam. Working with CTO Office as an Integrator he is also responsible for developing a Center of Excellence in Frameworks and delivering projects. Srini Kumar has worked in areas of IT Strategy, Enterprise Architecture, Application development/delivery and Project Management. Srini's management expertise spans IT Organization Assessment, IT Strategy, Portfolio Management and IT Process Improvements. Srini holds a bachelors degree in Engineering from Bangalore University followed by a MS from University of Texas, Elpaso.

Managing Director, Progress Software India

Ramesh Loganathan is presently Vice President (Products) and Managing Director of Progress Software in India, responsible for leading the product development at the India Development center. Prior to taking the above position, Ramesh was Vice President of Middleware Technologies at Pramati, responsible for driving the product direction and the Technology Consulting business. Ramesh has been with pramati since 2000, heading Product Engineering until 2004, and then helped setup the team (for Progress Software) that built the Sonic Workbench on Eclipse, eventually transitioned to Progress Software- India.

Ramesh is an accomplished Technologist and evangelist regularly speaking at workshops and seminars in India. Has been active in Tech fora, JCP and SPEC organizations. Member of several Standards Expert groups including J2EE 1.3. Co-founded ebXMLIndia.org and hyd-eclipse.org, and organizes BarCamps and Startup events.

Founder, Agile Developer Inc.

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. He has significant experience in architecture, design, and development of software applications. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects. He is a frequent invited speaker at various international software conferences and user groups.

He is author of .NET Gotchas (O’Reilly), coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning book “Practices of an Agile Developer” (Pragmatic Bookshelf), and author of “Programming Groovy”(Pragmatic Bookshelf).

Silverlight Geek, Microsoft Corporation

Jesse Liberty is a Microsoft Senior Program Manager in the Silverlight Development Division whose business card reads "Silverlight Geek". He is responsible for the creation of content to facilitate the learning and use of Silverlight and to foster a Silverlight Developer community. Jesse is the author of numerous bestselling books, including O'Reilly Media's forthcoming Programming Silverlight, Programming .NET 3.5, Programming C# 3.0 with Visual Studio 2008 and Learning ASP.NET with AJAX. Jesse has over two decades experience programming, consulting and training and has been, during that time, a Distinguished Software Engineer at AT&T; Software Architect for PBS/Learning Link; Vice President of Human Factors/ Information Technology at Citibank; and Microsoft MVP.

VP & Global Delivery Head, MindTree Consulting

R K Veeraraghavan, known as Veera at MindTree, joined MindTree in 1999 and is the Vice President, Global Delivery Head for their IT Services business. Veera started his career as systems programmer in the IT industry in 1988 and has played varied roles in technology leadership, Project management, managing complex transformational programs, setting up and running offshore development centers for customers across industry groups and delivering business enabling IT solutions for customers. His passion is in developing a multi disciplinary collaborative team to deliver solutions to customers in a predictive manner implementing strong quantitative techniques to execute software engagements. Veera, holds a degree in Computer Science. His passion is in the field of structured quantitative from BITS Pilani.

Consultant, University Relations, SAP Labs India

Prof. Sankaran received his BE in Electrical Engg from Jadavpur University and MS in Control Systems from the University of Pennsylvania, USA. His domain area of interest is Mathematical Modeling and Computer Simulation. He has worked in the industry for over 30 years, in India and USA, including the IT industry in Bangalore. He was with IIIT-Bangalore as Senior Professor and Associate Dean, before moving on to consulting for DaimlerChrysler, Infineon and Yahoo, mainly for University Relations. Presently he is Consultant to SAP Labs and handles University Relations for the company.

Prof. Sankaran has a long and substantial association with IEEE. He is a Senior Member and served as Chairman of IEEE Bangalore Section for 2002-03 and as Membership Development Chair of the IEEE Region 10 (Asia-Pacific) Executive Committee during 2004-06. Currently he is Region 10 rep on the IEEE HQ’s IB&SC Committee.

Consultant, Supercomputer Education Research Center (SERC)

Gopi is regarded as the local Internet Guru in the Internet circles esp., in the South East Asian Internet community due to his early involvement in the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) and other AP wide Internet initiatives. Passionate about Open Source Software (OSS) and both the free software as well as the OSS movements, he doesn't loose a chance to advocate the use of such software or demonstrate their functional use in specific contexts. He is currently an investigator of a DIT funded project on Reuse of Open Source Software for building commercial products: The impact of copyrights, licenses and Intellectual Property.

Gopi is a member of the Indian IPv6 Task Force. As the VP of the IPv6 Forum India, he is responsible for liaison with the government as well as with the academia on the directions relating to the adoption and use of IPv6 in India.