Moderator: Shubha Prithviraj, HP
Panelists: Bama Ramesh, IBM; Geeta Sharma, HP; Sunita Singh, Counselor; Cheryl Willis, NetApp

Abstract:

Making a career out of your job is an ongoing process of initiatives, challenges, and changes. Every woman has personal and professional needs to fulfill while she tries to adapt herself to these changes. However, it’s essential to identify that ‘work’ is not central to life, but a primary element of living! Therefore, it becomes imperative to address individual needs that are social, personal, and professional to enjoy a fulfilling life. In this fast paced world where competition is all-pervading, we are tempted to exhaust ourselves in search of the big career leap. Seldom realizing that we are wearing our tomorrow, today! So, how can we continue to be productive at work while enjoying a melodious guitar class? In this panel discussion, we introduce you to those women who have held on to their passion for work, achieved professional heights, enjoy a balanced personal life, and are here to give you tips on how to make it happen. Make use of this opportunity for some interesting takeaways.

Bios:

Shubha Prithviraj

Shubha is a Manager at HP IPG R&D Hub. She handles the delivery of connectivity solutions for Designjet Printers. Being in the IT industry over 15 years, she has handled development teams in various domains such as Automotive, Security systems, and Digital TV. She has worked with various international teams from US, Germany, Netherlands, and Spain. Before joining HP, she had a long stint with Robert Bosch, India and Philips. She holds a bachelors degree in Engineering Shubha keeps herself active by involving in hobbies such as painting, photography, badminton, and enjoys travelling. She was the captain of the women’s sports team in Bosch which won various corporate tournaments in Bangalore. Her 11 year old daughter keeps her busy on the weekends with athletics practice and guitar classes.

Bama Ramesh

Bama Ramesh is a Technical Manager with the Alliance team for Business Partners and has more than 18 years of experience in Software Development and Sales. In this role, she supports the Business Partners on Technical RFPs, Solutions and enablements based on IBM software products. In her earlier role, she was a Global Product Manager for Design and Construction tools in IBM Rational brand. She represented the customer and Rational’s business interests for the key lifecycle decisions related to these products. She used her deep understanding of market needs and technical expertise to direct internal efforts to optimally address those needs. In her earlier roles, she has managed several projects in various domains like Banking, Insurance and Telecom in both legacy systems and evolving technologies. In the personal front, Bama is a mother of 2 sons, aged 14 and 8. She loves to vacation and is known as the vacation planner of the family.

Geeta Sharma

Geeta has been working with HP for last 3 years as a firmware specialist in the Value Enterprise Firmware section of IPG R&D Hub. In her career career spanning7 years in embedded systems, She has worked with Samsung Electronics as a senior software engineer in printer firmware domain prior to working with HP. She has done Masters in Computer Sc. And App. from Kurukshetra University,Kurukshetra in 2003. She represented her school and college as a speaker for various events held at that level. She was an active member of samsung magazine committee and variours events(technical/non technical) held overthere. She won various extempores ,speech competions in her college and university . She has always got the best performance ratings and awards. In her spare time , She enjoy s reading,writing and listening to music. She often pens down her thoughts in her blog http://mythoughts-geetas.blogspot.com/.

Sunita Singh

Sunita Singh has had varied work experiences. As an army wife and mother, she dealt with frequent transfers, separations, and responsibilities concerned with social and welfare activities. In her professional life, she has been a teacher, an administrative assistant, and a human resources manager both in the corporate and NGO sectors. She has also trained as a volunteer counselor, and worked with Vishwas and then The Viveka Trust (a not-for-profit organization that offers free and confidential counseling services) in Bangalore for almost 17 years. As a counselor she has helped people with issues such as low self-esteem, difficulties with children, marital ups and downs, divorce, depression, addiction, grief and loss.

Cheryl Willis

Cheryl Willis, Director, NetApp, an innovative storage and data management solutions company. Her current role in the global support organization is to help managers strengthen the team engagement of geographically dispersed and technically siloed support staff, and work with the Support Director’s council to ensure progress. During her career, which includes 10-years at Ernst & Young, Cheryl worked extensively on people development, and has managed IT Operations departments comprised of people from different geographies and cultures, including Europe, Africa, Asia and North America.

Speaker and Moderator: Caroline Simard, Anita Borg Institute
Panelists: Gemma Burman, HP; Sandy Lieske, HP; Amruta Mishra, Nokia; Nisha Ninan, Nokia;

Abstract:

This session will explore the business case for diversity and learnings from actual diversity initiatives.
• The statistics on diversity figures, and how businesses with a diverse work force have a business advantage
• A case study of a long term diversity initiative at HP
• A case study of looking at diversity from the needs of the consumer, and how that can go organically back into the organization.

Bios:

Caroline Simard

Dr. Caroline Simard leads the Anita Borg Institute’s (ABI) research and executive program initiatives. Her research on the barriers facing women in technology has received national attention. She led the Institute’s first major research initiative: “Climbing the Technical Ladder: Obstacles and Solutions for Mid-Level Women in Technology.” She is also spearheading knowledge diffusion efforts and executive engagement programs directed at supporting organizational change for greater retention and advancement of technical women. Caroline holds a PhD in communication studies from Stanford University. Prior to ABI, Simard was a Researcher at the Center for Social Innovation of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Gemma Burman

Gemma Burman is a Director, at the Imaging and Printing R&D Hub, Hewlett Packard, Bangalore. Gemma is responsible for the creation of world class R&D teams in the areas of Enterprise Software and Workflows, Printer Drivers and Print Fleet Manageability. Prior to this, Gemma worked in Defence R&D (LRDE), in the area of Network Management and Tactical Communications and in Verifone developing Software for their Point of Sale terminals. Gemma holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science and a Bachelors Degree with Major in Mathematics from Pune University.

Sandy Lieske

Sandy Lieske is a Vice President at Hewlett-Packard Company in Boise, ID. Sandy oversees the Global Category Support, Serviceability, and Operations organization within the Global Customer Support Organization. Her teams have responsibility for all global category support management, IPG wide serviceability and quality initiatives, and GCSO operations management. She previously was Vice President of Core Technologies with the LaserJet Enterprise and Solutions business. She has been at HP since 1981. Sandy has a BS-ECE from the University of Wisconsin, a MS-ECE from the University of California, and a MS-Management of Technology from National Technological University.

Amruta Mishra

Amruta Mishra, currently working as a Team Lead in Nokia R&D, has 9 years of work experience on Mobile Platforms. Her technical expertise includes multimedia and camera Integration. Prior to Nokia, she worked as a Technical Marketing Engineer in STMicroelectronics and has huge experience in customer interaction across geography. An alumnus of IIM, Bangalore Amruta is thoroughly involved in the D&I activities in Nokia. She is currently involved in harvesting the ideas on gender bilingualism generated from crowdsourcing in Nokia internal sites by incorporating them into business development and roadmaps.

Nisha Ninan

Nisha Ninan is Head of Resourcing & Diversity for India & South East Asia Pacific (SEAP) for Nokia across multiple business units. She has facilitated Nokia India’ s agenda around D&I to establish a strong community of practice and business ownership creating a compelling business case for Diversity & Gender Bilingualism in India. She has been an HR Partner for over 17 years, and has played a key role in establishing and institutionalizing HR practices for leading organizations: IBM, SAP, GE, Accenture. She is especially passionate about building and leveraging a diverse environment to enhance employee engagement and empowerment.

Presenter: Priya Subramani, Yahoo

Abstract:

Vive la difference – Product innovation starting with the Emerging Markets What’s beyond $2500 cars, $100 laptops, $0.20c Maggie noodles?

Innovation does not always have to be sophisticated, high-end products but should include simpler, targeted products. This session will feature an overview and an audience discussion on cost and other innovators and the role of women as innovation drivers in Emerging & other Markets
1) Local “in country, for country” innovations like Shampoo sachets, Godrej Chotu Kool, Tata Nano
2) Wominnovations or innovations to empower women e.g. 60% of all scooters are bought by women
3) Women are the Emerging Market

Bio:

Priya Subramani

Priya Subramani leads the Advertiser Solutions group for India and South East Asia at Yahoo. She is passionate about bringing innovative solutions and products suited for emerging markets. Prior to this, she worked in several startups in Silicon Valley. She has a Bachelors degree in Computer Science from the University of Mumbai. When not at work, she enjoys spending time with her family and being mommy to her 2 children.

IIT Madras

Abstract:

This talk focuses on the development of linear and nonlinear time series models for traffic monitoring and shaping in data networks. In particular, we show that “time series models can successfully track (i) a Denial of Serice attack, (ii) model user behaviour (iii) model traffic behaviour and various ports. Statistics of different parameters are analysed, evaluated and modeled. It is shown that traffic anamolies can be detected within a few minutes using these models.

Bio:

Hema Murthy

Hema A Murthy got her Ph.d from IIT Madras, and M.Eng from McMaster University. She is a Professor at the Computer Science and Engineering Dept. of IIT Madras. She has been an International Fellow at SRI, and Scientific Officer at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. She is a member of the TeNeT group, which is committed making technology affordable for India. Her areas of interest include signal processing and machine learning for speech and network data. She received the IBM faculty award in 2006 for her work on “Speech synthesis for Indian languages.” As part of her commitment to society she works on “ICTs for Inclusive Education.”

Introduction by Hema Seetharamaiah, Wipro
Presenters: Madhu Katri, Wipro and Anindita Phukan, Phukan and Associates

Abstract:

Often a mysterious subject, “law” is a topic that generates a lot of curiosity in our minds. It is an area that is least understood by the majority of us, while in fact, it should be the most understood subject in reality!

The aim of this session is to make you aware of the legal aspects of a corporate and how you fit in. By attending this session, you can benefit from understanding IT law in India and other countries, IT women-specific legal rights, intellectual property law, case studies on how legal issues were resolved and so on.

Like they say, knowledge is power and knowing your legal rights is an important first step. So, join the M&M show to enrich yourself with presentations by successful lawyers Madhu Khatri and Anindita Phukan.

Bios:

Madhu Katri
Madhu Khatri has 20+ years experience in corporate law ranging from litigation consulting to in-house consulting. She trained at the office of the Attorney General of India for several years where she worked in the Supreme Court of India on landmark cases like the challenge to the affirmative action programme of the Government of India and the Bhopal Gas Leak matter, the world’s biggest mass tort. In the early 90s, she moved out of Supreme Court work and joined the tax department of Arthur Andersen where she handled complex tax litigation for several years before moving to PriceWaterHouse Coopers (PwC) where she worked with the Corporate finance team and started the legal department of PwC. In her in-house positions Madhu worked with Invensys Plc and General Electric before joining Wipro. As head of the legal department of Wipro Madhu’s role encompasses handling all mergers and acquistions for the company, compliance issues across all locations, transaction and litigation support amongst other day-to-day legal matters. Madhu is a LLB from Delhi University and a LLM from Columbia University, New York where she was awarded the Parker School Certificate for Achievement in International and Comparative law. Madhu spends her spare time reading and is a keen golfer.

Anindita Phukan

Anindita graduated from the prestigious National Law School of India University, Bangalore. Anindita started her career with what is now ICICI Bank Limited moving on to J. Sagar Associates, a leading law firm in India where she spent several successful years. Anindita also worked with AZB & Partners, one of the largest law firms in India before moving on to head the corporate advisory group at Poovayya & Co. for several years. Anindita has now established her law offices “Phukan & Associates” which advises clients on general corporate laws, mergers and acquisitions, foreign investments and employment laws. A veteran of almost 15 years, Anindita has regularly advised corporates, inter alia, on women’s rights in the workplace.

Moderator: Sudha Srinivasan, Intel
Panelists: Anjali Arora, CA Technologies; Beryl Nelson, Google; Nita Sharma, Intuit; Cheryl Willis, NetApp

Abstract:
How can companies position organizations, define processes and establish and utilize communication channels to create successful collaborations across time zones and cultures? During this session, panelists will identify key challenges and share their insights and techniques used to overcome the challenges of achieving success in global development projects that span disparately located teams, cultures and core work hours.

Bios:

Sudha Srinivasan

Sudha Srinivasan – Leader, Center of Competence for Social Computing at Intel, Bangalore. Sudha currently leads a team that is spread across three countries and is responsible for adoption and delivery of Enterprise 2.0 solutions that enable Intel employees worldwide to collaborate asynchronously. Over her 12-year career, she has worked at Infosys, Verizon Telecommunications and now Intel. Her positions have always involved working with and subsequently managing globally positioned teams, and she has extensive experience with co-location strategies and programs, where she has fixed employee work-life balance and career growth challenges that have drastically lowered attrition and delivered huge improvements in organizational health.

Anjali Arora

Anjali Arora – Vice President, Software Engineering, CA Technologies, an IT management software and solutions company. Anjali currently leads a software engineering team in Framingham, MA, USA and San Francisco, CA, USA and works closely with development teams at the company’s Hyderabad office. Last year, Anjali was named a 2009 Boston Business Journal “40 under 40” honoree. Anjali’s 16-year career includes work at a start-up company, at EMC and with CA Technologies—all with globally co-located teams.

Beryl Nelson

Beryl Nelson – Engineering Manager, Google, Hyderabad. Since early 2009, Beryl has led teams in the Engineering Productivity group, focusing on accelerating development at Google. Early in her career, she worked in functional languages and compilers. She has been in Asia since 1995 and in Hyderabad since 2004, working at a number of companies. Prior to India, she lived in Tokyo, where she took several years off to raise children and learn about the culture before joining Epos Japan. Beryl also has lived in Germany. She speaks English, Japanese and German. She is vice-chair of the Hyderabad ACM chapter, and a volunteer Educational Counselor for MIT.

Nita Sharma

Dr. Nita Sharma – Group Development Manager at Intuit, a leading provider of business and financial management solutions. Nita currently leads the Bangalore engineering team responsible for building products for accountants in the US market and has lead various other development teams in her eight years at Intuit. She played a key role in the initiation and growth of the Intuit Women’s Network at Bangalore. Prior to joining Intuit, Dr. Sharma led an engineering team at Icarian, which builds workforce management applications.

Cheryl Willis

Cheryl Willis – Director, NetApp, an innovative storage and data management solutions company. Her current role in the global support organization is to help managers strengthen the team engagement of geographically dispersed and technically siloed support staff, and works with the Support Director’s council to ensure progress. During her career, which includes 10-years at Ernst & Young, Cheryl focused extensively on people development, and has managed IT Operations departments comprised of people from different geographies and cultures, including Europe, Africa, Asia and North America.

Moderator: Sangeeta Bhattacharya, Intel
Presenters: Varsha Apte, IIT Bombay; Mangala Gowri Nanda, IBM and Hema Murthy, IIT Madras

Abstract:

This session aims to achieve a good understanding of research oriented careers in academia and industry. Through this session, we will explore job requirements, challenges and advantages of such careers. Accomplished panelists pursuing research careers in both industry and academia will share their work and their personal experiences. They will talk about the skill sets required to succeed in such careers and the options and opportunities available to those interested in this line of work. They will also help us understand whether there is a need for a PhD to pursue such careers and discuss the merits/challenges of getting a PhD.

Bios:

Sangeeta Bhattacharya

Dr. Sangeeta Bhattacharya is a research scientist in the Parallel Computing Lab (PCL) at Intel Labs, India. She is currently working on various workload optimizations on modern multi-core and many-core platforms and is particularly interested in data mining workloads. Sangeeta joined Intel Labs after receiving a PhD in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis in August 2008. Her research interests include ubiquitous computing, context-aware computing, wireless sensor networks, cloud computing, data mining and parallel computing. In the past, she has worked on ubiquitous healthcare platforms and application QoS provisioning in dedicated and shared wireless sensor networks. Other than work, Sangeeta is passionate about mentoring and is involved in various activities in this direction.

Varsha Apte

Varsha Apte is a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Bombay, where she has been since 2002. During the years 2009-11, she has been on leave from IITB and is Visiting Faculty at the Computer Science and Automation Dept. at IISC Bangalore. During 2009-10 she was part-time Visiting Researcher at IBM-IRL Bangalore. Prior to joining IIT Bombay, she was in the Network Design and Performance Analysis Department of AT&T Labs in Middletown, NJ. She received her Ph.D. from Duke University in 1994, and Masters from Pune University in 1989. Her primary research interest is in performance management (measurement, modeling, analysis and control) of distributed applications.

Mangala Gowri Nanda

Mangala Gowri Nanda is a Senior Researcher at IBM Research, in India. Her technical work involves inter procedural static and dynamic analysis of programs to build tools to aid programmers in bug-fixing. Earlier, Mangala completed her B.Tech in Civil Engineering from IIT Madras, and then worked designing bridges and buildings before marriage and family responsibilities brought a break in her career. She returned to school with her daughter and graduated with an M. Tech in Computer Science from IIT Bombay. Then she worked at Tata InfoTech Ltd, until the call of academics sent her back to complete a PhD in Computer Science from IIT Bombay. Subsequently she joined IBM.

Hema Murthy

Hema A Murthy got her PhD from IIT Madras, and M.Eng from McMaster University. She is a Professor at the Computer Science and Engineering Dept. of IIT Madras. She has been an International Fellow at SRI, and Scientific Officer at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. She is a member of the TeNeT group, which is committed making technology affordable for India. Her areas of interest include signal processing and machine learning for speech and network data. She received the IBM faculty award in 2006 for her work on “Speech synthesis for Indian languages.” As part of her commitment to society she works on “ICTs for Inclusive Education”

Panelists: Mani Abrol, Yahoo; Vidya Narayan, Google

Abstract:

Search engines have to make sense of the unstructured information present on web pages to make it useful for users. We will discuss the application of Machine Learning to extract this information.

Orkut is one of the leading social networks with over 100 million users worldwide. Orkut employs a variety of ML techniques in the areas of abuse prevention, porn detection, social data mining and real time spam classification.

Bios:

Mani Abrol

Mani leads the research engineering team at Y! Research, Bangalore. She is responsible for growing and mentoring research engineers, and successful implementation of research projects. She is interested in Information Extraction, IR, and large scale architectures. Previously she was a Principal Architect and Manager of the Parametric Search team at Verity.

Vidya Narayan

Vidya Rangasayee Narayan is an Engineering Manager at Google and, until recently, managed the Orkut engineering team in IndiaShe joined Google in 2005 in US and relocated to India in 2007. Prior to Google, Vidya worked at Paypal, some Bay Area startups and Cognizant. As a strong champion for Diversity, she helped launch the Google Women in Engineering Awards in 2008 and has been mentoring the program successfully for 3 years. Vidya holds a Masters in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering. Vidya is a trained classical singer and loves to learn languages of the world.

Moderator: Apparna Ramadoss, Intuit
Panelists: Mythreyee Ganapathy, Microsoft; Hemalatha Bhaskar, IBM; Jisa Kaladharan, NetApp; Removed per speakers request; Kumudha Sridharan, Wipro

Abstract:

Are you someone who is happy with your career and is looking for the next steps to rise in the ladder or are you someone who is bored with your current role and is looking for a new ladder? Irrespective, be assured, you are not short of choices. A career in technology offers you exciting and varied choices for work as new technology keeps evolving and as computers become increasingly powerful. You can always keep moving by learning and mastering new technology. An IT career has never been more accessible because of the large variety of programs and different modes of study on offer. In this panel, we introduce you to five dynamic women, each following a different career choice. These panelists will talk about their current role (the good and ugly), how they got there (education, skills, experience) and what are the growth options. Listen to them, grill them and decide for yourself if you are in the right career or need a change!

Bios:

Apparna Ramadoss
Apparna has been working as a software engineer for nearly 11 years now. She has spent the last 10 years working in US and last 5 years in Intuit (Mountain View). She recently moved to Intuit IDC and has been working on Business Intelligence and Optimization. In her role prior to Intuit, she has built and led a team of engineers (team size of 30) and managed an offshore team located in Bombay. At Intuit, she have been mostly working on open source Java, J2EE, EJB 3.0, Oracle, JBoss to name a few. She has also led a team in Intuit MTV office that worked on building the next generation platform.

Mythreyee Ganapathy

Mythreyee Ganapathy has 13 years of experience working in various computing careers. She started out as a systems integration consultant for PriceWaterhouseCoopers in the US and UK. After many years of globe-trotting, she switched careers by joining Microsoft as a Technical Product Manager to work on new products in integrated developer environments. After having no time to appreciate the cities and countries she visited besides their air-conditioned airports, she moved back to the hot climes of India in 2004 to help start and build the Microsoft Research Lab in Bangalore. She then continued to work on managing External Research for MSR India as well as building incubations for shared access computing in low income economies. In more recent years, she has been working in the Online Advertising business for Microsoft. Mythreyee has a bachelors in computer engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India and a Masters in Computer Information Systems from Bentley College, Waltham, Massachusetts.

Hemalatha Bhaskar

Hemalatha Bhaskar has over 13 years of experience in application software development. She is a Rational certified Application Architect and has over 6 years of experience in architecting and design of enterprise solutions based on the J2EE standards. Sshe has technically lead various teams on customer engagements in the Retail, BI and HR domains. Hema served as Application Development Manager and Architect for the IBM’s Application on- Demand Technology Resource Management (TRM) solution. As part of enabling the application and infrastructure management services to be delivered as an ASP, she was responsible for the conceptualization and design of the virtualization framework required for asset discovery and overall data centre management service with in the Technology Resource Management (TRM) platform. She is an avid, hands-on professional with core expertise in Java Sever Side Programming. Her other areas of active technology pursuits include Web 2.0 technologies, Cloud Computing, SOA, Asset Virtualization.

Jisa Kaladharan

Jisa Kaladharan is a Technical Writer at NetApp, Bangalore. She has more than 6 years of experience in technical writing. She started her career as an Instructional Designer. Her first job as a technical writer was with Ocwen Financial Solutions. She then worked as a Senior Information Developer in Huawei Technologies. As a writer, she has worked on GUI, CLI, and API documentation for various domains, including finance, telecommunications, and storage. Jisa has a Bachelor of Technology (Electrical and Electronics Engineering) degree from Calicut University, Kerala.

Removed per speakers request

Kumudha Sridharan
Kumudha Sridharan is a Vice-President, Testing services. In her Current Role she is responsible for Telecom/Technology and Media Business across all geographies across . She is heading a 3500+ strong testing team. She is a B.E (Electronics & Comm.) from College of Engineering Guindy, Anna University, Tamil Nadu and joined Indian Telephone Industries in Nov 86 and Managed varied roles from an Assistant Engineer to a Senior Engineer. She joined Wipro in 1995 and worked across various positions and roles across customers and focusing on testing business for the last 5 years. She is a veteran in Telecom Industry with more than 22 years of work experience in various Wire line and Wireless technologies and worked across with all major vendors in Telecom space as part of various roles in Wipro.

Moderator: Ratna Saripalli, Microsoft
Panelists: Bhargavi Nuvvula, Microsoft; Cynthia Srinivas, NetApp; Anuradha Srinivasan, Intel

Abstract:

The focus of the session will be on the skills that are required for a Successful Manager. Challenges and success inhibitors, differences between Technical and People managers and other common and not so common issues will be addressed. Come and learn from our most experienced Successful Managers from the industry and see what they have to say. This session is targeted for women pursuing a career as a technical and/or a managerial track.

Bios:

Ratna Saripalli

Ratna Saripalli has contributed to software development at Microsoft since 2006 and has about 14 years of Industry experience. She is currently a Senior Program Manager at MSIT, Microsoft India, leading Microsoft Partner Related Projects. Prior to this she was Senior Development Manager at MSIT, Microsoft India, leading a portfolio of Finance Applications. Recently, working with the MSN AdCenter, Microsoft, Redmond, she contributed to the Business Intelligence team. Earlier, she was a Research Scientist with Battelle, world’s largest R&D provider, developing software solutions for scientific computing software projects. Ratna has a Master’s Degree from Stanford University in Biomedical Informatics and Masters in Engineering from University of Florida.

Bhargavi Nuvvula

Bhargavi Nuvvula leads the Microsoft business solutions Center of Excellence in Microsoft IT India, Hyderabad. In this role, she is responsible for delivering world class engineering solutions to MBS customers. Bhargavi joined Microsoft from Satyam Computers where she was the global delivery head for Life Sciences practice. Earlier in her career she worked in companies such as MCI and Texas Instruments, where she developed large scale enterprise applications. She has a total of 17 years of industry experience. She holds a Masters in Engineering from Texas A&M University College Station and a Bachelors in Engineering from JNTU College of Engineering, Hyderabad.

Cynthia Srinivas

Cynthia Srinivas has over two decades of professional experience in product development, engineering management, and leadership in different technology companies spanning telecom, networking and Storage domains. She has worked in Wipro, Motorola, Cisco Systems and is now with NetApp. She is a Certified Quality Analyst from the Quality Assurance Institute, University of Florida. She led several successful initiatives at Motorola, Cisco, and NetApp and emerged as a leader. She is presently Director of Engineering in NetApp, and has the experience of leading teams in India and US reporting into her and driving a global charter out of Bangalore. Cynthia has a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science. She is indomitable, and indefatigable. She balances her work life with the parenting responsibilities of her two daughters aged 14, and 10. Her goal in life to leave something of value behind for everybody.

Anuradha Srinivasan
Anuradha is currently a senior manager at Intel with about 22yrs of experience in the VLSI industry. She has a bachelor’s degree in Engineering and has been in management roles for the last 12+ yrs. primarily in physical design. In her current role she manages the physical design team of ~80 people in one of the BUs in Intel India. She is married with 2 daughters. Her hobbies include reading, music and travelling.

Moderator: Preeti Jain, Yahoo
Panelists: Bhakti Pingale, Adobe and Vedavalli Raghavachar, HP

Abstract:
This session provides you a glimpse of unconventional technical roles taken up by women in India. Can you talk and have passion for technology? Then platform evangelism is for you! Evangelism is catching up fast as a career in India. Bhakti will tell you what evangelism is as a career, how it is different from Tech Sales and how women can make a difference in it. Organizations find it hard to find impact of project processes improvement on business. Veda will provide few nuggets on how a business process improvement specialist can contribute to improve “Operational excellence” of the business.

Bios:

Preeti Jain

Preeti Jain is a senior product manager in Advertising Platforms Group of Yahoo! India. She is responsible for strategy and product definition for enterprise class advertisers. Prior to Yahoo, she has worked for EMC Corporation, Merrill Lynch and technology start ups. She has fourteen years of experience and has worked as developer and tech lead in first half of her career. She holds M.S. Computer Science and an MBA in General Management. During her free time she likes to hike, bicycle and baking with her kids.

Bhakti Pingale

Bhakti Pingale is a Platform Evangelist in Adobe. She has been with Adobe for the last 4 years and is proud to be the only woman Evangelist in the Adobe India team. Prior to Evangelizing the Flash Platform she worked for the ColdFusion QE team. As an Evangelist she has spoken at various national and international conferences. She drives the Adobe’s Flex@Campus program to connect with students and equip them with latest Web technologies. She is actively involved in Adobe’s association with Software Industries. Outside her work, she loves cooking and does fashion designing as a hobby.

Vedavalli Raghavachar

Veda has an overall 18+ years of industry experience. For past 13 years she has been working on improving quality and productivity processes. She is an engineering graduate from Mysore University and a certified Six Sigma and Lean Sigma Black Belt holder. Her experiences include deploying ISO, TL9000, ITSM, and CMMi. In her current role, she is heading Quality and Productivity processes for HP IPG R&D Hub. Prior to this, she worked as a Quality and Process manager at Wipro technologies Interop Test division. Her papers have been accepted by PSQT, US. She has presented papers in HP Quality Summit at Bangalore and Women’s IT forum at Chennai.

Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM

Abstract:

The Linux kernel supports diverse hardware environments and workloads. In recent years, it has also seen change of code at an unprecendented rate. This creates challenges of satisfying conflicting design goals in any effort to make new contributions to the linux kernel.This talk elucidates how these challenges necessitate the minimalist approach taken in linux-kernel development with specific examples drawn mostly from personal experience. The iterations it took to get to final inclusion of some of these features brings out the elegant ways in which Linux redefines the concept of modularity as simple innovations around a low centre-of-gravity. An understanding of this minimalist development philosophy should enable aspiring kernel contributors and their organizations appreciate why it is sometimes essential to go a few steps backwards and master the art of iteratively developing a feature in evolutionary steps. It may well be this addiction to ephemeralization in the incorporation of even the smallest of kernel enhancements, which keeps Linux from becoming a victim of its own success as it stretches itself into spaces where no general purpose OS has gone before.

Bio:

Suparna Bhattacharya

Suparna Bhattacharya is a Senior Technical Staff Member at the IBM India Systems and Technology Lab, where she works with IBM’s worldwide Linux Technology Center. An Electronics and Communication Engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, she has been with IBM since 1993, where she has quite enjoyed delving into operating systems and filesystem internals on various platforms. It is now 10+ years since she made her foray into the Linux kernel and got introduced to the joys of working on open source. Some of the areas that she has played with on Linux include block I/O, asynchronous filesystem I/O, direct I/O, kernel dynamic probes, kexec, first failure data capture mechanisms and ext3 (now ext4) filesystem enhancements. Suparna is an elected member of the IBM Academy of Technology and a senior member of IEEE. Currently she is pursuing her PhD at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Suparna has been invited multiple times to Linux Kernel Summit which is a by-invitation only event where key contributors of the Linux Kernel gets together to decide the future roadmap of the Kernel.

Moderator: Manjula Gondi, CA Technologies
Panelists: Namratha Jaisimha, Intel; Malarvizhi Karumalai, CA Technologies: Jayashri Ramamurti, Google; Manjula Sridhar, Huawei; Gayatri Sundar, HP

Abstract:
Do you have about 4-5 yrs of career experience? Then you are past the newbie stage and are ready to transition to the next stage in your career. This session focuses on how you can be proactive about taking the driver’s seat, and steering your career in the direction that suits your interests and aptitude- be it individual contribution, management, or entrepreneurship. Being in the cross roads of your career, it would immensely help to learn from the experiences of our illustrious panel of women who have listened to their heart, taken some risks, expanded their sphere of influence and excelled in their chosen paths. So, join us to learn the art of choosing the best career-path, to reach your goal, and blaze the trail while enjoying the journey of getting there!

Bios:

Manjula Gondi
Manjula manages a team responsible for the development of a SaaS enabled PPM product at CA Technologies. She has over 12 years of experience in the IT industry in several domains like e-commerce, telecommunications, supply chain logistics as well as online banking. She worked as an independent consultant for several years in the US before moving back to India a few years ago. She was an active member of the Toastmasters club in the US. She enjoys outdoor activities and traveling with her family and has visited 16 countries so far. She has two children and lives in Hyderabad with her family.

Namratha Jaisimha
Namratha is a senior manager at Intel-India. She joined Intel in 2000 and leads a group that focuses on Server and Client Graphics development. The team is currently responsible for delivering the next generation Xeon processor as well as developing the highest performance integrated graphics for Client processor. She has lead teams over 70 people and delivered key projects for Intel. She has worked in CPU development for 20 years in Intel, IBM and Compaq. Namratha holds several patents in microprocessor design and micro-architecture. Namratha graduated from Georgia Institute of Technology with a MS degree and from SJCE, Mysore with a BE degree. Namratha is also a mother of two kids aged fifteen and eleven. She has been married for over 20 years and enjoys travelling with her family.

Malarvizhi Karumalai

Malar has over 18 years of experience in Technology in which she worked as a professor, research scientist and currently as an architect at CA Technologies for the past 6 years . Prior to CA, Malar was a research scientist at ISRO where she contributed significantly to re-engineering of real time processing software and held several positions at ISRO such as project manager and deputy operation director of mission data processing software for ResourceSat satellite. In Malar’s role at CA technologies as an Architect, she has contributed to several CA products in Storage, Records Management, Compliance and IT Client management domains. She has research papers to her credit and is an active member of ACM chapter in India. She enjoys reading, classical music, exploring temple architectures and collecting books on popular science and mathematics.

Jayashri Ramamurti

Jayashri Ramamurti is the Head of HR for the Engineering and Product teams in India. She has been with Google for 4 years now. Besides being a business partner for these businesses, she is also actively involved in a number of diversity related initiatives particularly in Engineering. Prior to Google, Jayashri spent close to 6 years in Vodafone as Head – HR for the Mumbai operations. She was also actively involved in setting up some of the newer operations of Vodafone in some of the southern circles like Chennai, Karanataka and AP. An alumnus of XLRI, Jamshedpur, Jayashri has also worked in Titan Industries Limited in their plant in Hosur and Arvind Mills Limited.

Manjula Sridhar
Manjula Sridhar is the Director, Market Analyses Group in Huawei Technologies. Formerly she was the Founder and CTO of Aujas Networks a security startup which dealt with end to end security. She has worked with Lucent’s wireless networks group where she managed various teams of system engineering and development.She also worked with IDG ventures a Venture capital firm as an Entrepreneur in residence. Manjula has M.S in network security from IIT Chicago and B.E from University of Mysore. She also has completed an executive management program. She is an avid cyclist, has a blackbelt in Karate and is an aspiring triathlete.

Gayatri Sundar

Gayatri is a Delivery Manager at HP handling a large practice at HP Business Technology Optimization handling 300+ people. She has over 2 decades of technology leadership experience. Experience encompasses a wide range of outsourcing, consulting, service delivery and manufacturing software organizations. She is a passionate, energetic and a thought leader in conceptualizing and executing on directions to gain business momentum. She has worked with various functions in HP. She has mentored many engineers within HP. She holds a degree in Engineering.

Moderator: Sapna Chandramani, BizHobNob.com
Panelists: Mamtha Banerjee, InvestmentYogi; Nita Goyal, ngpay

Abstract:
Two entrepreneurs will take you through their journeys of starting their own ventures. Nita is driven by wanting to do what she enjoys, her research project led to her first startup, an interest in doing something on her own led her to the second and now the promise of a new market to her third. While Mamtha also wanted to do something different, she saw a huge opportunity in the Indian market and made a conscious decision to turn entrepreneur.

Bios:

Sapna Chandramani

After spending 12 years in the software industry with multinationals like Oracle and Yahoo! across the US and India, she decided that she had the experience that she needed to take the plunge. Sapna has extensive experience building highly scalable systems, having led several global engineering teams at Yahoo! Her expertise also includes web scale ranking and detection algorithms. She sees tremendous opportunity with the changing needs of the Indian consumer, and hopes to generate value that would meet at least some of them.

Mamtha Banerjee
Mamtha Banerjee, founder and CEO of InvestmentYogi, was previously the Director of Technology at Travelocity and has over 14 years of experience building high performance internet applications. Mamtha has an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Chicago. She is an outdoor enthusiast (enjoys hiking, camping and running) and was the co-founder of the Asha, Dallas chapter.

Nita Goyal

Nita Goyal has 17 years of experience in the software industry – 13 years in Silicon Valley and 4 years in Bangalore – as software developer, researcher, entrepreneur, engineering manager, product manager and strategy consultant. Nita is currently consulting at ngpay, a mobile application startup in Bangalore, as their Senior VP for Products. Nita was a cofounder and VP New Product Development at Tavant Technologies, an IT solutions and services company. Prior to Tavant, Nita was a cofounder of Exemplary Software, an enterprise software company. She has also been a researcher with Hewlett Packard Labs in Palo Alto. Nita has a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from IIT, Kanpur, India. She is a fellow of the Reuters DV Program for Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford University.

Moderator: Ashwini Malthankar, Thoughtworks
Panelists: Deepa Bachu, Intuit; Preeti Jain, Yahoo; Savita Kini, Cisco; Samatha Raghavan, CA Technologies; Cynthia Srinivas, NetApp

Abstract:

This session will focus on three critical areas 1. How women today are now taking up more and more different/challenging technical roles, 2. Why do we see a significant drop in the number of women contributors after a certain experience levels in the technical roles (Cultural/negative influences) and 3 Challenges faced- in terms of failure, success and learning? How they have handled obstacles and will also share success stories of various people along with various organizational strategies to help women evolve in their existing roles

Bios:

Ashwini Malthankar

Ashwini Malthankar is presently working with Thoughtworks India as a Lead QA Consultant and working on the large scale agile distributed project. She holds over 11 years of software development experience primarily on product development and now agile process. Prior to joining Thoughtworks, Ashwini held positions with Oracle, Teradata and start up like Pi-Crop. Experienced in Open source as well as commercial automation tools and played the key role in Enabling Continuum Tool stack in the applications division for the MDM (Master Data Management) product. This involved evaluating various tools and implementing Continuum tools process. Worked on cloud computing as the early adopters at Picorp. Apart from working on automation and testing her interests are traveling and adventure sports.

Deepa Bachu

Deepa Bachu is an Offering Leader and Group Leader, Emerging Market Innovation in the Global Business Division of INTUIT Technologies. Her responsibilities include innovating for the emerging markets using Customer Driven Innovation – building solutions that enrich customers’ lives by solving important and unmet needs. Deepa has 15 + years in User Experience, Innovation and Product Development. After working at the Intuit headquarters for 5 years Deepa moved to India where she guides innovation and strategy for version 1 products. Deepa is an innovation and design evangelist. She has presented at several conferences and is an active member of design and innovation organizations. Having started out as a software professional in Computronics, India as a Programmer Analyst, Deepa has worked for companies like Digital Equipment Corporation (now HP), New Jersey, Merrill Lynch, New Jersey as an AVP in the User Interface Group, Kana Communications as UI group manager , Intuit Inc, California as a Sr. Manager User Experience Group, Intuit, India as an Offering and Group Leader, Customer Driven Innovation & Global Strategy.

Preeti Jain

Preeti Jain is a senior product manager in Advertising Platforms Group of Yahoo! India. She is responsible for strategy and product definition for enterprise class advertisers. Prior to Yahoo, she has worked for EMC Corporation, Merrill Lynch and technology start ups. She has fourteen years of experience and has worked as developer and tech lead in first half of her career. She holds M.S. Computer Science and an MBA in General Management. During her free time she likes to hike, bicycle and baking with her kids.

Savita Kini

Savita Kini is a Marketing Manager for Education and Healthcare solutions in Cisco. She has 14+ years of experience in R&D, Marketing, and Strategy. Savita began her engineering career in ATM, Optical & Ethernet switching, with Cisco San Jose in 1998 and has also worked in MindTree, Tonse Telecom, and as start-up advisor. She is a visiting faculty (2006-Present) for Management Program for Women Entrepreneurs at IIM Bangalore and Adjunct faculty for Inventions & Innovations course at IIIT, Bangalore. Savita has B.S (Electrical Engineering) from University of Mumbai, M.S (Computer Engineering) from Texas A&M University, and MBA from Cornell University.

Samatha Raghavan

Samatha has over 12 years of experience in the field of IT in services and product development companies spanning over banking, finance, US government welfare systems and Information Security domains. She has worked in various roles including software developer, technical lead, product line manager and a development manager in these years. Started her career with TCS in Mumbai and later moved to Northrop Grumman Mission Systems in the US. After spending about 6 years in the US, moved back to India in 2005 and joined CA India technology center in Hyderabad. She is a B.Tech in Comp Sci from JNTU Hyderabad and a certified PMP and CISSP. Her husband is an entrepreneur, has a startup in the security & governance space. Any spare time that her 2 daughters(5 ½ & 1 ½ yr olds) leave behind in her day, she reads.

Cynthia Srinivas

Cynthia Srinivas has over two decades of professional experience in product development, engineering management, and leadership in different technology companies spanning telecom, networking and Storage domains. She has worked in Wipro, Motorola, and Cisco Systems and is now with NetApp. She is a Certified Quality Analyst from the Quality Assurance Institute, University of Florida. She led several successful initiatives at Motorola, Cisco, and NetApp and emerged as a leader. She is presently Director of Engineering in NetApp, and has the experience of leading teams in India and US reporting into her and driving a global charter out of Bangalore. Cynthia has a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science. She is indomitable, and indefatigable. She balances her work life with the parenting responsibilities of her two daughters aged 14, and 10. Her goal in life to leave behind something of value for everybody.

Co-presenters: Jyoti Ahuja, Yahoo and Pooja Gupta, Google

Abstract:

This talk will cover two cases of computing at large scale:

Google’s testing infrastructure, which processes several thousand changes each day, running millions of tests and calculating project status for more than 2000 projects at each change!

And content optimization: delivering the right content to the right user at the right time at large scale, and how Yahoo! is leveraging the power of Hadoop stack to conquer this challenge.

Bios:

Jyoti Ahuja

Jyoti Ahuja joined Yahoo! bangalore in 2006 and has worked on various projects in Yahoo! web search engineering team. In past, she has worked on information retrieval methods for mobile pages and on developing a real time stream processing platform. She has co authored a paper for the IR work and also filed a patent application on the same. Most recently she is working on an award winning content optimization project that she will talk about in her talk – optimizing content based on user profiles and current interests for various Yahoo! properties. Prior to Yahoo!, she worked in a mobile applications company, Dataviz in Connecticut.

Pooja Gupta

Pooja Gupta is a Software Engineer in Test, and has been at Google since 2007. She has worked primarily in the Hyderabad office, and for the last 10 months, in Mountain View, as part of the Engineering Productivity team. She has worked on testing of a number of products, such as Calendar and Google Apps APIs, and has won quite a number of awards at Google. Most recently she is working as a developer on the project described in her abstract, that automates running all of Google’s internal tests at large scale. She is also actively involved with accessibility efforts at Google.