Inaugural Speaker

Dr. F.C. Kohli is universally regarded as the father of the Indian software industry. He carried the title of vice-chairman of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for years. Kohli has been the architect and the driving force of TCS’ phenomenal success. It is the first real Indian multinational, and led the way for every other software company to follow. It continues its leadership position and grows year on year in sales and profits without any surprises. Its blue-chip roster of Western clients makes it the envy of every other company, and it has a large domestic base too. However, the goal of TCS going public eluded Kohli till he stepped down as chairman in 2000. Kohli continues to be hyperactive, focusing his energies on education. His current brainchild is to use computer aided sounds and images to impart basic literacy, particularly to illiterate adults, in a matter of months.

Keynote Speakers

Ajit Balakrishnan is the Chairman & CEO, Rediff.com, which is listed on Nasdaq (REDF) since 2000. It has more than 40 million registered users, of which 10 percent come from outside India, mostly expatriate Indians in the US. Balakrishnan was also a co-founder and director of Rediffusion-Dentsu, Young & Rubicam, one of India's largest ad agencies. Balakrishnan sits on the advisory board of WestBridge Capital Partners, an Indian venture capital fund, and serves on the Executive Committee of Nasscom as well as the government committee reviewing the Indian Information Technology Act. He also co-chairs the Confederation of Indian Industry Task Force on eCommerce.

Hsinchun Chen, PhD is McClelland Professor of Management Information Systems at the University of Arizona and Andersen Consulting Professor of the Year (1999). He received the B.S. degree from the National Chiao-Tung University in Taiwan, the MBA degree from SUNY Buffalo, and the Ph.D. degree in Information Systems from the New York University. Dr. Chen is a Fellow of IEEE and AAAS. He received the IEEE Computer Society 2006 Technical Achievement Award. He is author/editor of 13 books, 17 book chapters, and more than 130 SCI journal articles covering digital library, intelligence analysis, biomedical informatics, data/text/web mining, knowledge management, and Web computing.

Noshir Contractor, PhD is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the School of Engineering, School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA. He is the Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group. He is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in communities. His research focuses on developing and testing theories and methods of network science to map, understand and enable more effective social networks. A prolific writer and author of several books, Prof. Contractor has published or presented over 250 research papers.  His book titled Theories of Communication Networks (co-authored with Professor Peter Monge and published by Oxford University Press) received the 2003 Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association.  He is the lead developer of IKNOW (Inquiring Knowledge Networks On the Web), and its Cyberinfrastructure extension CI-KNOW, a network recommender system to enable communities using cyberinfrastructure, as well as Blanche, a software environment to simulate the dynamics of social networks.

Jayanta Chatterjee, PhD is a renowned practitioner with rigorous academic involvement. Starting with Siemens as a Sales Engineer in India (1972) he went on to pioneer the introduction of programmable  control & advanced power electronics systems at Allen-Bradley India (A Rockwell Joint Venture with Crompton Greaves), where he rose to the position of President & CEO in 1990. He was chosen as the 'Manager of the Year' by Delhi Management Association in 1994. He was in the lead group of Rockwell Country managers in the Asia Pacific Council. He was the Co-founder and the Chief  Knowledge officer of  Plex in California, a venture funded CRM system developer during 2000-2001. Since 2001, Dr. Chatterjee is in full time academics and a Professor at the Industrial and Management Engineering Department of IIT Kanpur. He is a consultant and coach for several high technology companies and their key executives and continues to be a venture catalyst.

Pandu Nayak, PhD is Member Technical Staff at Google. Prior to joining Google, he was the Chief Architect and then CTO of Stratify, Inc., where he helped develop the technology underlying the very successful Stratify Legal Discovery Service. Before that he was a Research Scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center, where he was a key member of the Remote Agent team. The Remote Agent was the first Artificial Intelligence system to be given primary command of a spacecraft. Pandu Nayak received a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT-Bombay and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. His Ph.D. dissertation was an ACM Distinguished Dissertation.

Prabhakar Raghavan, PhD has been Head of Yahoo! Research since 2005. His research interests include text and web mining, and algorithm design. He is a Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the ACM. Raghavan received his PhD from Berkeley and is a Fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE. Prior to joining Yahoo, he was Chief Technology Officer at Verity; before that he held a number of technical and managerial positions at IBM Research.

Vijay V. Raghavan, PhD is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of Louisiana- Lafayette. Raghavan specializes in designing effective retrieval strategies aimed at improving the performance of a retrieval system through prior interactions with its users. The application domains include both text and image databases. Prof. Raghavan has published over 170 peer-reviewed research papers many of which appeared in top-level conference proceedings, such as the ACM-SIGIR, ACM-SIGKDD, IEEE-ICDE, IEEE-ICDM, WWW, as well as many reputable journals such as ACM-TODS, ACM-TOIS, JASIST, IEEE-TSE, IEEE-TPAMI and IEEE-TKDE. Prof. Raghavan’s research contributions have had a significant impact as measured by the number of citations in scholar.google.

Rohini Srihari, PhD is an educator, scientist and entrepreneur. She founded Cymfony, a company specializing in market influence analytics.  She is currently CEO of Janya Inc., a language technology company.  She is a faculty member in the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo.  Her research areas include information retrieval and text mining, as well as computational linguistics and information extraction. Dr. Srihari received a B. Math. from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University at Buffalo.

Panelists

Krish Ashok is an architect who has worked with TCS Insurance clients on several projects. He is currently exploring strategies and implications of bringing Web 2.0 into the enterprise. His interests include DIY web, Social networking in large enterprises and Collaboration. He is also a quizzing freak and a violinist/guitarist.

Sriram Bharatam started his career with Hewlett-Packard JV in the Strategy & Consulting practice, rising quickly through the ranks.  He left a very promising career to establish a non-profit to aid victims of a natural calamity that occurred in Orissa, India in late 1999.  An avid believer of the power of the world wide web, he used the power of internet to raise signifcant sum of funds for Cyclone victims & 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 prestigeous Kauffman Community Award for 'Social Entrepreneurship' in the year 2004. With this confidence he founded India's first full-cycle interactive agency, iridium Interactive in 2000. He is an alumni of MIT with bachelors in Engineering and Masters in Business Administration & a nominee of Ernst & Young 'Entrepreneur of the Year Award'.

John Blossom is the President and Senior Analyst of Shore Communication inc., a company committed to bring content, technology and people together. Mr. Blossom's career spans more than twenty years of marketing, research, product management and development in advanced information and media venues. He has rich working experience having worked as Vice President and Lead Analyst at Outsell, Inc. He speaks regularly at major industry conferences, including the SLA Annual Conference, SIIA Information Industry Summit, Buying and Selling eContent, InfoCommerce Annual Conference, the OCLC Symposium and other venues.

Kris Kumar, PhD is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore and the Cofounder of Cognitaa, a company specializing in Network Security. His research interests include Network Security and Programmable Hardware Architectures for emerging Web Technologies. He is also actively involved with Open Source and Open Core communities. He has 20 years of System Development experience in the US, both hardware and software.

Bino Paul G D, PhD is an economist. Currently, he is Associate Professor at the School of Management & Labour Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. He holds Ph D in Economics and M. Phil in Planning and Development from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He has done MA in Development Economics from Department of Economics, University of Calicut, India. His research interest includes Economics of Science, Regional Development, and Economic Systems.

Arun Ramanujapuram currently heads the Advanced Technology Group at Yahoo! Bangalore and has interests in cross-disciplinary technology research and its applications to Internet. In particular, he is interested in Information Extraction from the web and leveraging structured data for enabling newer applications in Search, Advertising and Web Communities. Arun started his career at Xerox PARC, and was part of an start-up in the US specializing in Enterprise Information Integration before joining Yahoo! at Bangalore.

Runa Sarkar is Assistant Professor in the Industrial and Management Engineering Department of IIT Kanpur.  A Fellow of IIM Calcutta, Runa specializes in Managerial Economics and Corporate Environmental Behaviour.  In addition to teaching courses in Economics and Strategy at IIT Kanpur, she has authored several book chapters and journal papers. She is an economist interested in socializing the use of ICT to build social capital in rural areas using the power of knowledge networks. Runa has a penchant for multidisciplinary research and is currently involved in the application of social informatics in the agricultural domain.  Her interests lie in sustainable development where business interests are protected in consonance with the furthering of environmental and social objectives.

As Founder and CEO, at Axiom Consulting, Satya drives Axiom’s vision of being a Global Product Innovation company. Satya’s primary focus areas are driving various Innovation initiatives within Axiom and go-to-market strategies through partnerships with well known brands and OEM’s. He spearheads customer centric innovation initiatives as well as breakthrough product ideas based on consumer insights. Based out of Detroit, Michigan for the first 10 years of his career, his roles varied from large account management to project management and quality management. Satya is a regular contributor of articles to various forums. He’s also a speaker on innovation at various forums.

Kiruba Shankar is a Senior Executive, Technical Communications at India Software Group, a Birla group company. He earlier had a long stint at Satyam Infoway, now known as Sify. Kribs, as he better known among his friends has a penchant for teaching. He is a guest faculty at Anna University and is a Regular at the seminar circuit. Kribs blogs his daily life at www.Kiruba.com. He loves writing on technology and has written for many leading IT magazines like DQWeek, DataQuest, Express Computers, CIOL.com and ITspace.com.

Shobha, an Experienced professional in the area of Application Software -Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Project Management, Account Management with over 19 years in IT. Her domain areas include Banking, Portfolio Management and Custodial System. Major strengths are knowledge on Software Engineering, Project Management Competency Development, and Quality Management, and Knowledge Management. During her tenure at Perot Systems for 10 years, She has led the quality function taking through the ISO 9001/CMM/CMMI/BS 7799 Certifications, and handled quality consulting assignments with key clients. Currently She leads the Knowledge Management and Training function in Consulting and Application Solutions Division of Perot Systems. 

Gian Sunder Singh, PhD is the Head of BREW CoE under the Advanced Technology Application Group of TCS. Singh holds a Ph.D from University of Paris VI. He has completed research in Computational Fluid Dynamics, parallel computing and artificial neural networks. Singh is an honorary professor at Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

Bob Stembridge graduated from University of Sussex with a BSc in Chemistry. He joined Thomson Scientific in 1980 and has held various roles in editorial, marketing, sales and product development. Leaving in 1988 for interludes working as Information Analyst specialising in patent analytics at British Petroleum and European Sales Liaison with Dialog, he returned to Thomson Scientific in 1996. In his current role, he is responsible for liaison with customer user groups for the organisation.

L. Venkata Subramaniam, PhD was born in New Delhi, India. He received the B.E. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Mysore University, the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Washington University, St. Louis, USA, and the Ph. D. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India. He joined the IBM India Research Lab in 1998 where he currently works with the unstructured Information Analysis Group. Venkat has worked in image processing, speech analytics, text mining and social networking using mobile phones. Recently he has also been working on creating a mindshare in the research community for processing noisy data from real life. Venkat has published several research papers in conferences and journals and has two patents granted till date. He has great passion for research & innovation. He has given talks at various technical fora, conferences and universities. Whenever possible he also enjoys teaching and interacting with students at IIT Delhi.

Anchors

Rohit Agarwal is  the founder and CEO of techTribe Networks. Prior to starting techTribe, Rohit has held the positions of Vice President, Strategic Marketing at Baan Company, Founding VP of Marketing and Business Development at Webify Solutions, Founding VP, Marketing at CommercialWare and VP, product strategy at newScale. He has also held Sales and Marketing Management positions at Remedy Corporation (acquired by BMC) and FileNet (acquired by IBM).

Kavi Mahesh, PhD is the Hewlett Packard Chair, Professor of Computer Science at PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore, Founder and CEO, EasySoftech.com and Knowledge Management Consultant, Infosys Technologies. Mahesh did his M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1991 and Doctorate from the same Institute in 1995. He obtained his M. Tech from IIT, Mumbai. He has been teaching, researching and is into development from the past 18 years (11 years in USA) including Oracle Corporation, Infosys Technologies Ltd., Georgia Tech, and New Mexico State University. He has authored over 30 papers and book chapters. His areas of interest include Knowledge management, information retrieval, text processing, automatic classification, unstructured data management, intelligent systems, databases, data structures, and algorithms.

Madanmohan Rao, PhD is an Internet consultant and author based in Bangalore, India. He is the editor of two book series: “The Asia Pacific Internet Handbook” and “The Knowledge Management Chronicles” (McGraw Hill). Madan was formerly the communications director at the United Nations Inter Press Service bureau in New York, and vice president at IndiaWorld Communications in Bombay. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology at Bombay and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, with an M.S. in computer science and a Ph.D. in communications.  Madan is currently the director of the InfoComm Observatory at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore.

Waltraut Ritter, Research Director, Knowledge Enterprises, Hong Kong. Ritter has served as information management consultant for the UNDP in Geneva and New York. At the corporate level, she conducts information and knowledge audits, evaluates intangible assets and know-how capital, introduces methods to manage and measure intangible (knowledge-based) assets including intellectual property. She was the Director of the Knowledge Management Practice (2000-2002) with Mindtheme Consulting Group and Visiting Assistant Professor for Knowledge Management at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (1999).She is a member of the Academy of International Business and the Euro-Asia Management Studies Association. She is also the founding president of the HK Knowledge Management Society, a non-profit association for information and knowledge management professionals.