Abstract

HiPC attracts participants from academia and industry and serves as a natural place to develop stronger ties between academia and industry. The goal of this session will be to have panelists from both industry and academia to discuss the following questions in the Indian context:

1. What should be the goals for a tighter Industry-Academia partnership?

2. What are the key challenges in enabling tighter industry and academia partnerships?

3. What problems are worthy of academic engagement to pursue research that would be relevant to the Indian industry?

4. What are the possible tactical and strategic initiatives that both sides can take to leverage each other better?

5. What can HiPC do to enable a deeper partnership in this regard?

6. What can/should the government do to foster such partnerships?

7. What can the attendees/organizers of HiPC do to address this challenge?

Invited Panelists

Academia:

• Dr. Uday Desai, IIT Hyderabad
• Dr. P J Narayanan, IIIT Hyderabad
• Vishnu Manchu, CEO, Sree Vidyaniketan University Trust
• Dr. Chakravarthy Bhagvati, Central University, Hyderabad
• Dr. Pallab Barua, Sri Satya Sai Insititute of Higher learning
• Dr. Govindarajan, IISc Bengaluru

Industry:

• Prakash Raghvendra, AMD Fellow, Bengaluru, India
• Dr. Ashish Tendulkar, Machine Learning Architect (GPay), Google research, Bengaluru
• Sandeep Kohli, VP of Engineering at Flipkart

Moderator: Rama Govindaraju, Engineering Director, Google Platforms Engineering, Sunnyvale

The session will start with each panelist spending 10 minutes responding to the questions above followed by Q&A from the audience and the moderator. The session is currently scheduled for the afternoon of Dec. 18th, 2019 from 1 pm to 3:30 pm.

Moderator: govindaraju@google.com , Contacts: info@hipc.org/hipc2020/hipc2020

Date: Dec. 18, 2019, Time: 1:00 pm – 3:30 pm

Session: Birds of a Feather, Context: Industry, Academia

Speaker Bios

Dr. Uday Desai. IIT Hyderabad

Dr. Uday B. Desai received the B. Tech. degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, in 1974, the M.S. degree from the State University of New York, Buffalo, in 1976, and the Ph.D. degree from The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, U.S.A., in 1979, all in Electrical Engineering. He was the Founding Director of IIT Hyderabad from June 2009 to July 2019. At present he is Prof. Emeritus and Head of Operations for Center for Healthcare Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Consultant for Telecom Standards Development Society of India. From 1979 to 1987 he was an Assistant Professor and then an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Washington State University, Pullman, WA, U.S.A., From 1987 to May 2009 he was a Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the Indian Institute of Technology – Bombay. He was Dean of Students at IIT-Bombay. He has held Visiting Associate Professor’s position at Arizona State University, Purdue University, and Stanford University. His research interests are in wireless communication, cyber physical systems, IoT and AI. He is the editor of one book and coauthor for 9 research monographs. He has graduated 25 Ph.D. students, and over 100 Masters students with Thesis option. He is the author/coauthor of nearly 300 peered reviewed papers in international journals and international conferences. Dr. Desai received the outstanding Alumni Award from University of Buffalo, and the Distinguished Alumni Award from IIT Kanpur. He is on the board of Tata Communications Limited . He is a member of many central and state governmental committees and several governing councils of leading academic institutions. He was also on the Visitation Panel for University of Ghana.

Dr. P. J. Narayanan

P J Narayanan is the Director of IIIT, Hyderabad and a researcher in the areas of 3D vision, computational cameras, and parallel computing. He built the Virtualized Reality system in mid 1990s at the Carnegie Mellon University to capture 3D geometry and appearance of dynamic events. He also was an early adopter of GPUs for several Computer Vision and general computing tasks. He got his bachelors from IIT Kharagpur, masters and PhD from the University of Maryland, all in Computer Science. He was a research faculty member at the Robotics Institute of CMU from 1992 to 1996 and headed the Vision and Virtual Reality groups of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Bangalore from 1996 to 2000. He has been with IIIT Hyderabad from 2000 and has been its PG Coordinator, Dean of Research, and, from 2013, the Director. He was the President of ACM India from 2009 to 2014 and is currently the Chair of its Research Board.

Vishnu Manchu

Mr. Vishnu Manchu Chief Executive Officer, Sree Vidyanikethan Educational Trust is an adept edupreneur with rich experience and skills in setting up, developing and managing educational institutions of diverse disciplines and levels. His core competencies lie in Infrastructure Planning and Development, Risk Assessment and Management, Budget Forecasting and Planning, International Relations and societal outreach. Pre-schools for reaching the large numbers in vast expanses of the country, encouraging sports, instituting Rural Health Schemes and starting Art Foundation are his niche initiatives besides managing the educational institutions. Thinking outside the box, his ideas and initiatives have steered the institutions into nationally recognized and accredited institutions. In his pursuit of excellence, he always emphasizes the contributions of education to national development.

Dr. Chakravarthy Bhagvati

Dr. Chakravarthy Bhagvati is currently a professor in the School of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Hyderabad. His research interests are Image processing, Colour image processing, Pattern recognition and, of late like everyone else in image processing and pattern recognition, deep learning. Chakravarthy received his PhD in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York (USA) and has been working at the University of Hyderabad since 1998. Chakravarthy worked as Professor-in-Charge of the Centre for Modelling, Simulation and Design (CMSD) at the University of Hyderabad which houses several high-performance computers; and was a Member, Advisory board for establishing a high-performance computing centre by the Govt. of Rajasthan. He is also a life member of the Indian Unit of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (IUPRAI). Outside of research, Chakravarthy is keenly interested in enthusing young students to explore the joys of Computer Science and is also an avid amateur astronomer armed with an 8-inch telescope!

Dr. Pallav Kumar Baruah

Dr.  Pallav Kumar Baruah completed his PhD in Mathematics, in the area of Differential Equation and Analysis from Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, Prasanthi Nilayam, in 1994.  He is blessed to continue his teaching career in the same institute. He is pursuing teaching and research in Existential and Qualitative Theory of Differential Equations, Parallel and Distributed Computing.  His research interest includes High Performance Computing applied to various domains in Computational Science. Current research interest of his group is in Health Care Analytics, HPC & Big Data with AI tools. He is also working on Scalabaility and Interoperability of Blockchain. Computational Actuary is a new domain he is collaborating with Actuarial practitioners to develop solutions for various problems in the domain of Actuarial Science using AI, Blockchain and HPC. Some of the recent engagements in the area are in Fraud Detection & Management in Insurance Domain, Health-Insurance Claim Management, ERM dashboard with Predictive capability, E-Voting using Blockchain, Platform for Credential and background verification using Blockchain, Blended Learning: Blockchain based authenticated data assimilation into Deep Learning models etc.  He has won a number of awards in various National and International Forum for best paper and posters. He was awarded the Innovation Award, 2014 by NVIDIA, HiPC Goa.

Dr. R. Govindarajan

Dr. R. Govindarajan  has been with the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre and the Department of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore since 1995.  His research interests are in the areas of High Performance Computing, Compilation Techniques, and Computer  Architecture. He received his B.Sc. degree in Mathematics from Madras University in 1981 and B.E. (Electronics and Communication) and Ph.D. (Computer Science) degrees from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 1984 and 1989 respectively. He has held postdoctoral research positions and visiting faculty positions at Universities in USA and Canada.

Dr. Prakash Raghavendra

Dr. Prakash Raghvendra completed his PhD from the Department of CSA, IISc, Bangalore  in 1998. Dr. Prakash has worked for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Adobe Systems in Bangalore, till 2009 in several areas in computer systems. Between 2009 and June 2012, Dr. Prakash has worked as Associate Professor in the Department of Information Technology, NITK Surathkal. Dr. Prakash is currently working as a Fellow in AMD, Bangalore, in the area of server software optimizations including Java and Machine Learning.

Dr. Ashish Tendulkar

Dr. Ashish Tendulkar is a machine learning architect at Google Pay.  Ashish is interested in solving real world problems with Machine Learning.  He has 15+ years of experience in developing ML systems in different domains and academic research.  Ashish was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Madras prior to Google.  He has also worked with Persistent Systems Ltd., Reliance Industries, Media.net and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in his career spanning 20 years. Ashish holds M. Tech and PhD from IIT Bombay.

Sandeep Kohli

Sandeep Kohli works as VP of Engineering in Flipkart and is responsible for building platforms for Flipkart. Over the last 5 years in Flipkart he has been responsible for building a complex event processing platform, User Graph Services, Machine Learning Platform, Streaming platform and Big Data Platform.  Sandeep Kohli has 22+ years of industry experience. He holds a masters degree from Indian Institute of Science.  Prior to Flipkart he has worked for C-DAC, Rational , IBM and Numerify and also tried hands at his own startup.