Moderator: Bhargavi Nuvvula, Microsoft

Panelists: Renu Khanna, Mahindra Satyam; Shaila Patil, Cisco; Renu Rajani, IBM India and Jayashree Venkataraman, Microsoft

Abstract:
College to Corporate Ten Takeaways

Suddenly you are out of the safe haven of the classroom, where you were tested on schedule, and deadlines were months away. You are thrust into the harsh reality of your first job. Deadlines are “tomorrow, at the latest.” There are no formal exams, but don’t ever forget — you are being tested; every day. The results come, not in report cards, but in annual performance reviews. You are one spoke in the wheel that makes the organization run. Are you ready for the change? Come to this session and learn from our experienced panelists on various topics, such as commitment setting, prioritizing, interpersonal awareness, emotional intelligence, upward management and many more such tips to make your transition better prepared.

Bios:
Bhargavi Nuvvula

Bhargavi Nuvvula is Product Unit Manager for MBS IT India and is a core team member for Microsoft IT India College Recruiting and LEAP. Prior to Microsoft she worked for Satyam Computers as global delivery head for Life Sciences practice. Earlier in her career she worked in companies such as MCI and Texas Instruments. She has a total of 18 years of industry experience.She holds a MS from Texas A&M University College Station and a BE from JNTU, Hyderabad. She holds several industry accreditation’s including Six Sigma Black Belt, Project Management Professional from PMI and MCP in SQL Server development.

Renu Khanna

Dr. Renu Khanna Heads the Leadership Development at Mahindra Satyam. She brings with her over 25 years of rich functional experience in learning in the IT and Non IT companies. Prior to joining MSAT, Renu worked at Tecumseh. She is a trained facilitator and conducts programs on DISC, FIRO, SPIRO, Thomas Kilman conflict styles, TA and many more Renu is a Doctorate in Sociology as a fellow from Indian Council for social science and research(ICSSR). She was the President of ISTD Hyderabad chapter from 2008-2010.She is also on the board of various institutes and members of various committees.

Shaila Patil

Shaila Patil is working as a Solutions Product Manager to drive the development of new solution offerings to enable Cisco’s Smart Connected Communities vision. She was instrumental in leading the team to establish Bangalore as a hub to incubate innovative support models for new solutions such as Smart Services and emerging technologies as part of Technical Services globalization efforts. As part of inclusion and diversity effort, she co-led the Cisco Connected Women (CCW) India Chapter. She enabled CCW as a platform for Women to Connect, Develop and Excel and hosted Cisco Connect Women Leadership forum.

Renu Rajani

Renu Rajani is General Manager at IBM and leads remote infrastructure support services for IBM Global Account in IBM GTS -SD. She has been with IBM for over 5 Years. She has 22 years of experience and held leadership roles with Satyam (Test Services), KPMG Bearning Point (Supply Chain & IT Consulting), and headed a start-up for a year. Renu holds an MS (Management) degree from Purdue University USA. She holds ITIL V3, CSTE, PMP, CPIM and CFA certifications. Renu is author of book Software Testing – Effective Methods, Tools and Techniques published with Tata McGraw Hill (ISBN: 0-07-058352-8).

Jayashree Venkataraman

Jayashree Venkataraman, a member of EE team is responsible for driving engineering enablement in MSIDC. Her team supports R&D and IT teams to grow the capability of engineers by strengthening their software development efforts and improving engineering practices. She was earlier Director of strategy and Planning and Quality for MSIT India. She worked with General Electric Co.(GE) where she was the COE leader for Application Management. She has 20+ years of IT Industry experience. She is also a published author of the book “Project Leadership” and chapter contributor to the book “Field Guide to Project Management” by David Cleland.

Moderator: Sushma Chakkirala, Intuit

Panelists: Pallavi Arora, Cisco; Sheela Kashyap, Intel and Mini Manakame, Aditi Technologies

Abstract:
Job is an action that needs to be done. A career is a chosen pursuit. A mission is the point where your skills, talent and interests meet and you are able to be a change agent. A job is not “bad” and a career is not “good” as long as it is by choice rather a compulsion.

How do you turn a job into a career ? How do you build a career path and continue to align and re-align yourself along the way ? This panel aims to transform the mindset in order to enable women to own their careers objectively.

Bios:

Sushma Chakkirala

Sushma is an Engineering Manager in the Shared platform Services team in INTUIT. She has has been in the software industry for 12+ years where majority of her experience is at Sun Microsystems on Java EE Middleware and Integration technologies. She completed her Bachelors from Goa University and holds a Masters in Computer Science from California State University.

Sushma lives in Bangalore for the past 6 years with her 2 children and entrepreneur husband. She loves reading, learning and supporting social causes around women and children.

Pallavi Arora

Pallavi Arora is a Senior Engineering Manager in Network Operating Systems Technology Group at Cisco systems India Pvt Ltd

Pallavi brings with her 20+ years of IT industry experience that ranges from support, testing and development of Operating Systems, Telecom and networking products. Pallavi successfully started and lead the Connected Women Leadership Forum at Cisco. Pallavi is an active member of this ERG and has lead many career development and students focused initiatives. Pallavi is a native of Bangalore. She has 2 kids. Her husband works for Dell. Pallavi loves to travel, read, network and watch movies.

Sheela Kashyap

Sheela has been in the industry for about 14+ years in the embedded systems area. She graduated from B.M.S college of engineering in Bangalore with a Electronics and Electrical degree. She worked for 6 ½ years at RadiSys Corporation in Portland, Oregon on Windows driver development and Layer2 switching protocols for network servers. She relocated to home town, Bangalore, 7 years ago and joined Intel in a People management role for 5 years in the area of Graphics chipset validation. She took a break from work three years ago after the birth of her son. She returned to Intel in Jan as a Validation lead.

Mini Manakame

Mini Manakame heads global operations for Aditi Product Services, a division of Aditi Global Services. With overall 15+ years in industry, she has been with ADITI for 12 years and has played various leadership roles in the company. Mini is also the founder and chairperson for the Women’s Association of Aditi (WAA). This group has diversity goals and looks towards the best interests (professional and personal) and development of all Women @ Aditi. Mini has a Bachelor’s degree in Technology, with a major in Electronics and Communication. Apart from Aditi, Mini has also worked at Microsoft Corporation in Seattle as a Program Manager for 3 years.

Moderator: Lavanya Krishnamurthy, CA Technologies

Presenters: Vijayalakshmi Mahadevan, School of Chemical & Biotechnology SASTRA University and Aruna Rajan, IBM Research

Abstract:
Bioinformatics is the application of computer science and information technology to the field of biology and medicine. Bioinformatics deals with several areas in computing and IT. Bioinformatics forms a key component in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical sector. Because of this, IT companies and pharmaceutical companies tend to share man power with similar skill sets. This opens up new job opportunities for human resource from both disciplines.

So a session on this giving details of this field from both IT and bioinformatics experts point of view will be useful. Questions to be answered: What are the applications of computing in bio technology? How IT helps to speed up research in bioinformatics? What type of research or projects going on in IT companies regarding healthcare? How to use high performance computing to address problems of importance in biology Specific questions on the speaker’s presentation.

Bios:

Lavanya Krishnamurthy

Lavanya Krishnamurthy is a Principle Technical Writer at CA Technologies. During her 13+ years in the IT industry, she has held varied roles in training, programming, customer support, and technical writing. She is very passionate about writing. She likes trying her programming skills once in a while to get refreshed. Lavanya has significantly contributed to the Service Management products at CA. She mentors other writers and has been actively involved in various organizational initiatives.

Vijayalakshmi Mahadevan

Dr.M.Vijayalakshmi obtained her Ph.D. from the National Centre for Biological Sciences –Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore. She has worked on understanding large scale nucleosomal complexes and their structural functions using physical and computational approaches of molecular modelling and dynamics. She currently leads a research group on Chromatin Epigenetics that deals with chromatin modifications in diseased states. She has delivered talks at reputed conferences in State University of New York, Albany, Cambridge University, UK, EMBL, Heidelberg, Germany etc., She is a Principal Investigator at the Open Source Drug Discovery Initiative of the CSIR – an international programme for drug development.

Aruna Rajan

Dr.Aruna Rajan has Ph.D. in theoretical physics, B.E in Comp.sc and MSc in physics. Her Ph.D. involved using high performance computing, statistical physics and mathematical modeling of protein folding, in biotechnology and biophysics. She has worked with Prof. Klaus Schulten and Prof. Yoshitsugu Oono, to report on the first ever atomic-level detailed complete simulation of protein folding starting from its unfolded state. She worked on the design of optical sensors using nanotube-DNA complexes to deliver drugs to cancer cells. She has written a book chapter on computing in biotechnology and nanotechnology. At TIFR she worked on Alzheimer’s disease.

Presenter: Shalini Kapoor, IBM India

Abstract:
Secure data protection on smart phones and tablets is of great importance these days. With the proliferation of consumer apps, social networking sites and enterprise apps on the same phone, data leakage concerns is increasing amongst enterprises. This session will explore usecases of malware attacks in cyber world on devices, data leakage issues and how enterprises are coping up with them. This session will also discuss how mobile security policies are being adopted by enterprises. Bring your Own Device(BYOD) is a trend wherein employees can bring their own mobile devices and enterprise will install applications on them but would want to govern them through enterprise specific policies. This session will explore how security is being handled at the device level, and this will have representation of some relevant research happening in several enterprises around this topic.

Bios:

Shalini Kapoor

Shalini Kapoor , Chief Architect Industry Solutions at IBM Software Labs is leading the Mobility and Growth market solutions. She is leading research incubations on Mobile Security, Mobility testing and Mobile money. Shalini has been the Lead Integration architect for complex multimillion dollar deals happening globally and has led design of cross brand SOA solutions for industries : FSS, Distribution and Public Sector. She is first woman within IBM India to become Senior Certified Architect . She is a Distinguished Lead Architect, The Open Group and member of IBM Academy of Technology. She was recently awarded Women Achievers award by CII.

Moderator: Preethi Ramesh, IIT Bombay

Panelists: Ranjita Bhagwan, Microsoft Research, India; Jyoti Bhat, IIM Bangalore and Maya Ramanath, IIT Delhi

Abstract:

The fundamental objective of this session is promote research as a rewarding career among women. The panel also addresses the transition from industry to academic life, for those professionals who want to obtain their doctoral degree. The objectives of the panel: While many parents are encouraging their children to be lawyers or doctors, there is also a rewarding career in research sciences. In this panel, we bring together women with strong research backgrounds and discuss why they chose to tread this path. We also discuss why women choose to resume their doctoral studies after contributing to industry thus looking at the transition from industry to academic life.

Bios:

Preethi Ramesh

Preethi Ramesh is currently a research assistant at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay working on virtualization and cloud computing. She has been actively involved in open source projects and helped set up the FOSS club at her alma mater, Amrita School of Engineering. She attributes everything what she is today to her mentors who’ve contributed to her development and hopes to be a link in the chain of mentoring. Things on her wishlist include entering a triathlon, whipping a seven course meal and developing technologies aimed at contributing significantly to the society.

Ranjita Bhagwan

Ranjita Bhagwan is a researcher at the Mobility, Networks and Systems group at Microsoft Research India. Previously, she was a research staff member at IBM T. J. Watson Research in Hawthorne, NY, USA. Prior to that, she completed my PhD in 2004 from the University of California at San Diego. Her interests are mainly in solving problems related to Networking and Distributed Systems.

Jyoti Bhat

Jyoti has 18years of industry experience in software delivery, research, product management and process consulting. Jyoti has now switched to academics and is pursuing a doctorate at IIM, Bangalore in Information Systems Management. Till recently she was a Principal Research Scientist, leading the Business Process Management Research group within Infosys Labs.She is a certified CMMI assessor, BS 25999 and ISO 9000 Auditor trained in Six sigma techniques. Jyoti has filed for 5patents and has several publications on Process Management, Requirements Engineering and Software Engineering. She is on the program committee and review committee of many international conferences and workshops.

Maya Ramanath

Maya Ramanath is an assistant professor in the Dept. of Computer Science and Engg. at IIT-Delhi. Previously, she was a researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbruecken, Germany for more than 5 years. She graduated from the Indian Institute of Science in 2006 with a thesis titled: “Schema-based Statistics and Storage for XML”. Her research interests are in the area of database and information retrieval techniques for semantic web data management, information extraction and opinion mining.

Presenter: Linda Bernardi, StraTerra Partners, LLC.

Abstract:
The objective of this presentation is to take a 360 degree view of the essential components in the planning, funding, execution of a startup. The thesis rests on the premise that there are considerations far beyond a ‘great idea’ involved in building a ‘great startup’. These elements include specifics related to the startups (technical edge/ability, uniqueness of idea, ability to execute, competitive differentiation, marketability, business plan, go to market strategy), critical elements regarding the customer/ strategic market positioning, the nature and specifics of funding, board of directors, board of advisors and the ability to see from vision to execution clearly and with strong determination to name a few. As women entrepreneurs global 360 also look at the added levels of preparedness that women CEO’s, specially first time CEO’s will need to adopt, particularly in fundraising and leading their respective startups.

Bio:
Linda Bernardi

Author (Provoke), provocateur, technologist and investor. With leadership experience spanning over two decades, Linda Bernardi has a strong vision and passion for emerging and future technologies. Linda has launched StraTerra Partners, a consultancy offering strategy services in enterprise oriented technologies. StraTerra Partners works closely with large enterprises and technology providers. Disruption leading to Innovation to Excellence. She founded the Bernardi Leadership Institute to focus on Innovation-based leadership. www.LindaBernardi.com.

Linda is an active technology investor, entrepreneur and board member. Linda is a successful entrepreneur and has held several senior executive leadership positions in high-tech across key verticals, and strategic consulting.

Moderator: Catherine Lang, Swinburne University of Technology

Panelists: Alana George and Magda Stremeski, Thoughtworks

Abstract:
We present a partnership model that is a three way win because it is beneficial for academics, industry and university students. The model has resulted in research grants and research publications therefore achieving the goals of academics. It has been beneficial for the university students by providing support networks and opportunities to mentor school students. It has also enabled female undergraduates to be mentored by professional women. Lastly the partnership is beneficial to professionals in the computing industry by providing them with strong links to universities and access to high quality graduate female students.

Bios:

Catherine Lang
Dr Catherine Lang is Associate Dean (Student Engagement) at Swinburne University of Technology. She is a Chief Investigator on the ARC funded Digital Divas Project. With her colleagues from Monash and Deakin Universities she has partnered with the Education Department and the Australian Computing Society to deliver this unique program to secondary schools in Melbourne and regional Victoria. She also founded the Women in ICT community at Swinburne University. From 2005 to 2011 Catherine was ACM-W Australian Ambassador and in this role actively contributed to panel sessions at several USA Grace Hopper events.

Alana George
Alana George is a Software Developer with ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy and has a strong interest in the challenges involved in recruiting more women into IT. She has worked as a facilitator and established the web portal for the Digital Divas project and is a contributing author to Tech girls are chic (not just geek), a book aimed at attracting high school girls to a career in IT.

Magda Stremeski
Magda Stremeski is a Business Analyst Consultant with ThoughtWorks. She completed a Bachelor of Business Systems at Monash University and a Bachelor of Information Technology at Swinburne University, where she took part in the Digital Divas program. In 2008, Magda became interested in getting more women involved in IT when she became a finalist in the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. Today, she is involved in a number of organisations and programs aimed at encouraging women to join and stay working in IT in her hometown of Melbourne, Australia.

Moderator: Urbi Mukherjee, Thomson Reuters

Panelists: Anjali Arora, Allscripts; Krista Claude, Thomson Reuters; Aynesh Johnson, Goldman Sachs and Sandhya Vasudevan, Deutsche Bank

Abstract:
After much focus on mentoring, the tide has now shifted. Most believe that our growth to the executive level has a lot to do with power and what power can do for us if we are connected to the right source – or not connected at all. In short, a mentor can answer our questions on how to navigate the corporate landscape, but the sponsor gets us there. So how do we get someone to sponsor us?

Bios:

Urbi Mukherjee
Urbi manages the entire portfolio of Eikon projects, a tool which is pegged to be the single source for market leading news from over 170+ specialist commodities that are critical for trading and liquidity. She is a part of the corporate MIS technology division at Thomson Reuters and leads their Women in Technology group in India. An engineer by education, she has 12 years of work experience. Prior to this, she has worked with Dell and Cisco. Her need to moderate this session lies in the fact that she passionately feels that successful careers need to be built, albeit painstakingly.

Anjali Arora

Anjali Arora is Vice President of development at Allscripts responsible for Revenue Cycle and Access Management engineering organization that builds next generation financial management products for healthcare industry. Anjali has more than eighteen years of experience in the software industry. Prior to joining Allscripts, she worked at CA Technologies for 13 years, managing their Application Performance Management portfolio. She has also worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, EMC Corporation and River Run Software Group. She was named 40 under 40 honoree by Boston Business Journal in 2009.

Krista Claude

Krista Claude is CTO within the legal division at Thomson Reuters. In her current role, she leads a department of approximately 1000 technology staff, responsible for product and content software development and support. Krista serves on the advisory board of the Anita Borg Institute, chairs the Women@Thomson Reuters Eagan Chapter and is a member of the Women@Thomson Reuters Global Advisory Council. She received her undergraduate Computer Science degree from the University of Iowa, and has worked in a variety of roles in the technology industry for over 20 years.

Aynesh Johnson

Aynesh is head of the Human Capital Management (HCM) Division in Bangalore. Aynesh earned a BA in Mathematics from Duke University in 1992 and an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1997. She is also the global head of Global Leadership and Diversity within HCM, a role she has held since 2008, and is responsible for the firm’s diversity and inclusion efforts. Aynesh is a board member, and former board president, of the Lincoln Square Neighborhood Center, a nonprofit organization that services underprivileged families on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Sandhya Vasudevan

Sandhya has over 24 years of experience in the IT/IT Services Industry with Guardian Royal Exchange / AXA, Thomson Reuters and now Deustche Bank. Currently she heads the India Service Center, is the Global Head of Business Engineering within GBS, is on their Asia Pac Management team, part of the Regional Diversity counsel and is a member of the People Exco within GBS. She is currently on the Regional Counsel of Nasscom in Karnataka, Advisory committee member of Nasscom Foundation, founding member of Bangalore Chapter of the Women Leaders’ group in CII and a member of the World/Young Presidents Organization.

Moderator: Smrithi Rekha Venkatasubramanian, Amrita Unviersity

Panelists: Chaitra M. Bhat, IBM India; Kajari Ghosh Dastidar, Cognizant Technology Solutions; Uma Garimella, Teacher’s Academy; Anjali Sardana, IIT Roorkee and Durga Toshniwal, IIT, Roorkee

Abstract:
Universities and colleges design their curriculum as comprehensive as possible inorder to prepare students for a wide range of career choices. Often students find themselves in difficult situations unable to pay equal attention to all subjects in the curriculum. Many a times, this arises because there seems to be a lack of understanding of the role played by the subjects in shaping the career of the student. When students understand the bigger picture, the importance of studying a particular subject and how it would benefit her future, we strongly believe that learning would be a joy.

The objective of this session is to help students understand the value of subjects thereby helping them to build practical expertise in the subjects of their curriculum. Through this, we believe, she will be better equipped for employment. This session will demonstrate through discussion, the direct linkage of the curriculum with career domains.

Bios:

Smrithi Rekha Venkatasubramanian
Smrithi Rekha, is currently a faculty member at the Deparment of Computer Science and Engineering at Amrita University since 2005, Coimbatore. She has an MS in Information Systems from Amrita, State University of New York Buffalo and an Engineering degree in Computer Science from Madurai Kamaraj University. Smrithi was with Infosys Technologies before moving into academics. Since October 2010, Smrithi has been an exchange researcher at University of L’Aquila, Italy. Her areas of interest include Software architecture, Business Innovation and FOSS.

Chaitra M. Bhat

Chaitra Bhat M in her current role is timing lead in processor department at IBM/India. Her qualification is B.E (Electronics) from Bangalore university and M.S (electronics) from BITS-Pilani (industry collaboration). She joined IBM in November 1998 . She has total of 14 .5 years experience in industry specializing in VLSI design – physical design of ASIC/SOC , timing of ASIC/SOC/Processor. She is a member of IEEE and ACM, recipient of “Rising Star” award from WOCT and several others from IBM. She holds one patent. Her area of interest is timing and timing optimization. She is actively involved in mentoring.

Kajari Ghosh Dastidar

Kajari has a PhD in Computer Science from University of Iowa. She initially, joined R&D wing of Cognizant Technology Solutions at Chennai. She then moved to the delivery environment of the IT service industry and moved to CTS, Kolkata (also, my home town). As part of her PhD work she worked in a project to develop a programming language and middleware for sensor networks. Currently she is working on a global project at Cognizant Technology Solutions, Kolkata.

Uma Garimella

Dr Uma Garimella is the founder and director of Teacher’s Academy, an organization for driving educational quality through excellence in teaching. She is also a consultant at IIIT-Hyderabad’s Centre for Education Technology and Learning Sciences and heads the Centre for Faculty Development and Management at NMREC, Hyderabad, and a regular guest faculty at JNTU-ASC and ESCI.

Anjali Sardana

Dr. Anjali Sardana is presently Asstt. Prof in department of electronics and computer engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee. She has been working in the area of security since past 8 years. Her current research interests include cyber security, Information Security and Intrusion Detection. She has recently co-authored book titled “Honeypots: A new paradigm to information security” published by taylor and francis group, CRC press US (Feb 2011). She is actively involved in R&D activities, supervising masters and Ph. D. students (20 +) and running MHRD funded research projects in area of security.

Durga Toshniwal

Dr. Durga Toshniwal is presently working as Assistant Professor at the Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering,IIT Roorkee, India. She has a PhD from IIT Roorkee.Previously she worked as a Software Consultant in USA for some years and then pursued her research in data mining. Some of her areas of research interests include – time series data mining, web mining, privacy preserving data mining, data stream mining, applying soft computing techniques in data mining and text mining. Dr. Durga has published herresearch work in various international journals and conferences.

(This session has been modified from the printed program)

Moderator: Neha Garg, NetApp

Panelists: Deepak Menon, Myntra; Rekha Prashanth, Goldman Sachs and Snehal Smprati, NetApp

Abstract:
Have you been too myopic on your view of choices IT industry has to offer and restricting the choices to that of development and qa engineer ? Do you know how many different career choices are available to you?

Computer science is a fascinating field bursting with creativity and opens up potential for multiple roles, especially , in today’s fast moving world where new technology and newer roles being offered by IT industry are emerging at a whopping rate . Its vital to know those emerging career options and widen the arena of roles one can pursue in IT career. .

We bring to you a versatile set of panelists who will help you understand various roles , how to reach to those positions and the journey ahead.

Bios:

Deepak Menon

Deepak is currently the Senior Vice President and Head of Product Management, User Experience and Customer Connect at Myntra.com. He was the Principal Product Experience Manager at the Microsoft India Development Center. His group owned the User Experience of key scenarios in Consumer and Emerging Market areas as well as the user experience of a number of Productivity and Server/Enterprise applications. Before moving back to Microsoft, he was the User Experience Head at Google, India. He has a dual Masters in Architecture and Fine Arts (specializing in Design).

Rekha Prashanth

Rekha is a Business Analyst and Project Manager within GSAM technology team in Bangalore. She joined Goldman Sachs in 2007 to start off with Business Analyst and Project Management function in Bangalore and focus primarily on strategic and cross divisional type of initiatives. She has provided thought leadership and driven several global initiatives from Bangalore. She is an active member of Women in India Technology, Technology Business Forum and Functional Training Group.Prior to joining the firm, Rekha worked at J P Morgan Chase, New York as Project Manager and Business Analyst. She is BS in Computer Science and MS in Physics from University of Mysore, India.

Snehal Smprati

Snehal Samprati has over 9 years of diverse experience ranging from Marketing Analytics, Engineering and Project Management in Services organizations like GE Capital (now Genpact) and IBM, to one of the top Product Companies in the Storage Industry – NetApp where she has been working for the last 3 years as a Marketing Manager leading the Business Analysis group for Core Product Management, NetApp Bangalore. She has worked in supporting a short film on the importance of girl child education in rural Karnataka “Maralida Belaku” which is due to release this year.

Saranya Sriram (Speaker Cancelled)

Saranya works as a Developer Evangelist in Microsoft India focusing on Microsoft’s latest cloud services technology. Inherently interested in Microsoft technologies and developer tools, she has spent considerable time in other Microsoft business units in India and Redmond. She is a graduate from BITS Pilani in Computer Science and Masters in Physics. She is passionate about technology, community meet-ups, presentations and 2 way dialogues. She seeks to reach out to the developer community audiences to make aware of the next generation in software computing, where the future is headed towards;the power and need of software services Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform.

Presenters: Kalika Bali, Microsoft; Dinesh Mandalapu, HP Labs India; Gowri Nagarajan, TBAK College, Tamil Nadu and Anbumani Subramanian, HP Labs India

Abstract:
Human-computer interaction is moving away from keyboard and mouse, to touch and non-touch methods as technology reaches common people. Handwriting recognition, speech recognition, camera-based hand-gesture interaction are becoming more important for users like artists, musicians, technologists, and at the extreme the illiterate. Distinguished researchers in this session present more insight into ‘what next’ happening in the research labs as the industry is preparing for break-throughs in human-computer interaction and what kind of skills are required to work in this field.

Bios:

Kalika Bali
Kalika Bali is researcher with the Multilingual Systems group at Microsoft Research Labs (Bangalore). Her research interests are in Speech Technology and Computational Linguistics, especially for Indian Languages. A linguist by training, she has taught at the University of the South Pacific. She has worked in the area of research and development of Language Technology at both start-ups and established companies like Nuance, Simputer, Hewlett-Packard Labs and Microsoft Research. She has also been actively involved in development of Standards related to language technologies. Currently she focuses on use of language technologies for education, and cognitive processing for language use.

Dinesh Mandalapu

Dinesh Mandalapu is Research Scientist, HP Labs India. His current focus is on enabling natural and intuitive interactions by exploring new and emerging modalities of interaction like multi-touch, pressure and camera based input. He works on developing machine learning algorithms for interpreting gestures and Indic script handwritten character/word recognition. He is pursuing Ph.D. at the IISc and has been a reviewer for several international conferences focused on handwriting recognition and human computer interaction. He holds an M.E. (2005) in Electrical Engineering from the IISc, Bangalore. His interests are in the areas of pattern recognition, machine learning and human-computer interaction.

Gowri Nagarajan

Gowri Nagarajan is Dean of Science at TBAK College and is research scholar waiting to defend her thesis on online Tamil language character recognition. Gowri has been teaching college graduates for 20years and played key roles in syllabus design for computer science and IT and member of academic council. Gowri has published many papers and presented in conferences on online handwritten character recognition with specific focus on Tamil characters. Gowri has also implemented the proof of concept for the mathematical method she has developed for her Doctorate.

Anbumani Subramanian
Dr.Anbumani Subramanian is a Senior Research Scientist at HP Labs, India. His present work is focused on camera-based gesture recognition for use in human computer interaction. Earlier, Anbu was a post-doctoral associate at Virginia Tech where he built a vision-based navigation system for autonomous boats. He was a Member of Technical Staff (Intern) at the HCI group of Rockwell Scientific in 2001 and was as a Software Engineer at IBM for 3 years from 1996. He received his Ph.D. from Virginia Tech. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE. His research interests include computer vision and pattern recognition.

Moderator: Sasi C. Tadepalli, Microsoft

Panelists: Anuradha A, Infosys and Ashu Thangaraj, HP

Abstract:
Cloud computing, with its potential as the next generation for software services, is viewed as the most sustainable method for application deployment in the IT industry. With an increasing number of companies developing and transforming for the cloud, a parallel need to establish new test Strategies, methodologies, tools and techniques is emerging in the industry. Testing applications on the cloud still focus on the traditional types of testing – functional, performance, stress, load and security. What differs is how these tests are executed for applications that are deployed in the non-traditional sense and are virtually available to all who can hook to the cloud. The criticality of certain types of testing like security and scalability needs to be strategized differently and involves specific techniques to qualify the product or solution. In this panel, we hear from the women in the industry that have worked on delivering multiple solutions in the cloud. The challenges of moving to the new technology, the similarities and differences between between the various cloud platforms and the technical difficulties of executing a test solution for the cloud will be explored amongst the panelists.

Bios:

Sasi C. Tadepalli

As a Principal Test Manager at Microsoft, my responsibilities include generating and implementing engineering test plans, improving on the current performance infrastructure and increasing the automation coverage. Over the last few months, I have been involved in the migration project of one of our main applications to the Microsoft Cloud. Coming from a development background and leading a test team gives me a unique perspective into the release cycle. EDUCATION M.S, Univ. of Wyoming B.Tech, Andhra Univ., India EXPERIENCE Principal Test Manager, Microsoft, Hyderabad Sr. Architect/Lead, ESP Systems, Charlotte Software Development Engineer IV, Alcatel, Dallas Sr. Programmer, NTC(VeriSign), Dallas.

Anuradha A

Anuradha is a Delivery Manager with Independent Validation Solutions, Infosys, and manages a large testing portfolio spread across multiple locations and customers in the Manufacturing, and High Tech Sectors. She has evangelized Independent Testing and has authored whitepapers on Process Improvement and Adopting Test Automation. She anchored the New Engagement Pricing Models Initiative which won an Organizational award. She has a BE with over 19+ years in the Telecom/IT industry in Product Development, Engineering Management and Leadership. She had donned a variety of technical and managerial roles with experience in large transformation programs, Consulting, test strategizing and automation to execution.

Ashu Thangaraj
Ashu is the Project Manager at Hewlett Packard, IPG R&D Hub, Bangalore and leads the product development of Enterprise document workflow Solution, Delivery Manager. Ashu had been leading the qualification of printing solution for 2 years. Under her leadership the qualification has been strategized to qualify the E-print service with focus testing solutions hosted over cloud. Testing with millions of printers simulating connections to the cloud added to the challenge. Today the solution boasts of over 3 million web printers. Ashu holds a BTech from BITS, India. She also has PMP certification and recently received the “Earhart Award” from HP.

Moderator: Pratibha Moogi, Samsung

Panelists: Serene Banerjee, HP Labs; Poornima Mohanachandran, i2iTeleSolutions and Ramya Rao, K&S Partners

Bios:

Pratibha Moogi
Pratibha holds PhD from Oregon Graduate Institute in the area of speech processing & speech recognition. She has done her Masters from IIT Kanpur. She has been associated with various research labs such as SRI, IDIAP, ICSI Berkeley, T J Watson IBM in the past. Last 8 years she is serving coorporate industry wherein her experience involves working with Texas Instruments, Nokia R&D Center, and lately Samsung Electronics. Her area of interest is Multimedia and related emerging technologies.

Serene Banerjee

Serene Banerjee is a Senior Research Scientist at HP Labs, India, working on Document Image Processing. Prior to joining HP Labs, India, she worked on image/video processing algorithms in Texas Instruments, India, Inc. and Intel, Inc. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004. Her dissertation was on composition guided image acquisition for digital still cameras. She holds 2 patent applications, 2 refereed journal papers, 14 refereed conference papers in the image/video processing area and one contribution in the JPEG 2000 standard. She is a member of the IEEE.

Poornima Mohanachandran

Poornima Mohanachandran is Executive VP with i2iTeleSolutions. At i2i she is responsible for strategy and development of telemedicine solutions covering Tele Radiology, Tele Ophthalmology etc. She holds a bachelor of engineering from Regional Engineering College, Calicut and Masters in Engineering from Indian Institute of Science and has spent 20 years in semiconductor industry.

Ramya Rao

Ramya Rao holds a Bachelor degree in Information Technology Engineering. She is a registered Patent Agent and has earned a Bachelor’s degree in Law. Ramya represents both domestic and foreign clients in the area of Computer Science, Computer Networks, Embedded Systems, computer applications and software, Electronics and communications and telecommunications. She is involved in patent drafting, prosecution, opinions on patentability, technology landscaping, freedom to operate, managing patent portfolios of clients, oppositions, filing and prosecution of designs. She represents several multinational and domestic corporations on variety of IP matters.

Presenter: Nandini Vaidyanathan,CARMa (Creating Access to Resources & Markets)

Abstract:
What does it take to be an IN-HOUSE entrepreneur at a large corporation? Can the allure of a paycheck be teamed with a zest to own the roadmap without owning the business? We say YES. But don’t believe us – come find the inner entrepreneur in your self.

In keeping with the theme of “What Next”, we are showcasing Intrapreneurship as a natural progression for women working in the IT industry and looking to take that tiny step towards “owning” and influencing the key decisions in your organizations. All this and more WITHOUT the risk associated with branching off on your own.

In this engaging and collaborative workshop, you will be introduced to the concept of intrapreneurship and will explore ways to ideate and innovate within the realm of your business, get buy-in for ideas, and make a larger impact to your organization.

The session is open to everybody.

Bio:

Nandini Vaidyanathan

She is an alumnus of Delhi School of Economics and London School of Economics. She spent 20 years in the corporate sector heading MNC’s pretty much on most parts of the inhabited continent. For the last six years, since her return to India, she has become a traveling teacher and teaches entrepreneurship in several ivy -league business schools around the world including Princeton, London School of Economics and National University of Singapore.

Her moment of epiphany happened six years ago when she realized that in India not too many people became entrepreneurs simply because they didn’t know how. So she founded her company Startups to mentor entrepreneurs (forstartups.blogspot.com) .Up until July this year, she has mentored over 600 startup entrepreneurs across domains, across geographies, pro bono. Startups has also been involved in mentoring women to scale from livelihood enterprises to opportunity based and profitable organizations in Afghanistan, countries in South and East Africa and India.

A year ago, she founded CARMa (Creating Access to Resources & Markets), (www.carmaconnect.in) with a lofty ambition: to change the karma of entrepreneurs in India. CARMa mentors startups, mature enterprises and family businesses.
She writes a regular monthly column for the magazine.

She is the author of the best-seller, Entrepedia, a step by step guide to becoming an entrepreneur in India.

She is a TED speaker.

Moderator: Reema Aggarwal, Microsoft

Panelists: Irina Ghose, Microsoft India; Bina Khimani, IBM India; Savita Kini, Cisco and Shrividya Ramarathnam, Intuit

Abstract:  What are the offbeat roles?  Why do women shy away from choosing off beat roles?  Are these offbeat roles looked ‘down’ upon from image perspective?  What could be a path to reach Technical sale roles?  What are the advantages and disadvantages of Technical sales roles?  What kind of Technical Marketing roles are available?  Are such roles available in abundance?  How difficult is it to prepare and apply for the same?  Does HR role propose a good career option?  Does Technical role transitioning into HR provide a good platform in large ODC’s and ITES companies?  Do the offbeat roles give more all-round professional experience to an individual?  Is ‘Customer support’ role a good progression in a Technical career?  What challenges did the panel face when they switched the line?  Did they have to equip themselves with degrees or trainings before they applied for the change?

Bios:

Reema Aggarwal

Reema Aggarwal is a science Graduate from Delhi University. Presently she leads the engagement for Microsoft with Wipro Globally. Previous to joining Microsoft , she worked in Senior sales roles, selling software for large organization such as SAP , Oracle and IBM in India and South east Asia. She has in excess of 17 years of work experience and has worked across different industries like FMCG, Manufacturing and IT products.

Irina Ghose

Irina Ghose is the Director- Education and leads the overall initiatives of Microsoft India in the Education segment. This involves working with the Government, Education Institutions, Students, Academicians and the Partner Eco-system to optimize the learning environment by way of technology. She has personally been passionate about the education segment and has also worked with institutions in the past towards various solutions in this areaor to this, she was at Wipro Infotech & HCL. Irina holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from IT, BHU and an MBA from XLRI, Jamshedpur.

Bina Khimani
Bina Khimani is leading a worldwide mission focused on helping Service Management business in emerging markets. She is presently working as a Head of Service Management Center of Excellence and Data Center Ana-lytics in IBM, India .In addition to Service Management Center of Excellence, she is also establishinga new mission focused on Strategic Alliance and Ena-blement of Business Partners. Bina has frequently spoken at various interna-tional conferences. In addition to co-authoring a book, she has also served as a Faculty at Golden Gate University, San Francisco and Bhavnagar University, India.

Savita Kini

Savita Kini is a Solutions Marketing Manager at Cisco for Cloud, Video and Collaboration based solutions in Healthcare, Education, and Entertainment. She has 15 years of experience in R&D, Marketing, and Strategy. Her current role involves bringing Cisco’s new emerging solution to market globally. Savita began her engineering career in Cisco and has also worked in MindTree, Tonse Telecom, and as start-up advisor. She is an 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.

Shrividya Ramarathnam

Srividhya leads the txtWeb initiative for Intuit India. Prior to joining Intuit, Srividhya was the Director of Consumer Marketing at Ocwen Financial Services where she was responsible for driving the cross-sell and partnership marketing strategy for Ocwen, Srividhya was with Capital One’s Auto Finance and Small Business Banking divisions and has worked in various capacities from operational consulting to marketing analytics. In her capacity at Capital One she was responsible for customer acquisition, credit policy. Srividhya has an MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow and engineering in Electronics and Communication from Pondicherry Engineering College.

Moderator: Ameeta Roy, IBM

Panelists: Anuradha Biswas, Prakat Solutions; Rona Collins, IBM; Jessie Paul, Paul Writer and Rajiv Ramachandran, Goldman Sachs

Abstract:
Effective..Motivated…Dependable..Collaborative..what words should describe you ? What’s your brand ? You can’t avoid being labeled .The human mind has been tuned to recognize consistent patterns and form associations. The labels attached to you become your personal brand. What are some of the lessons you can learn from the career journeys of successful people ? Our panel will discuss some of the skills and traits that have been “difference makers” and valuable tips on how to effectively brand and market yourself.

Bios:

Ameeta Roy

Ameeta Roy is the Global Programs Leader for IBM Global technology Services , leading global initiatives on standardization across IBM delivery centers. Prior to this , she was the Software IT Architect Manager , IBM Software Group, leading a team of Software Architects in India. In a career spanning 19 years with the last 9 in IBM, she has been helping customers architect, design, build and trouble scale enterprise applications as well as embedded software systems using IBM Solutions. Ameeta is an IBM certification review board member and the Gender Ambassador for IBM Global Technology Services.

Anuradha Biswas

The Founder and CEO of Prakat, Anu has been an evangelist for independent testing through her 18+ year journey and has extensive experience in organization building, service portfolio creation, business planning. She was earlier the AVP of the Independent Validation Solutions group at Infosys which she co-founded and grew to 8000 people and $ 300 Million. She has been exposed to “doing it all myself” in the startup world to the “ask and we will provide it” culture of a large company. This gave her the ability to appreciate and work with the various aspects of creating a balanced organization.

Rona Collins

Rona Collins is VP, IBM Global technology Services responsible for providing Remote Infrastructure Services to clients around the world. Rona has extensive work experience in the IT Industry with 20 years in IBM. She has benefited from a variety of roles across many of IBM business units, including consulting, systems integration, applications and infrastructure management as well as finance and operations. Thirteen of her 20 years with IBM have been in international roles and this is her first experience in Asia. She brings with her a passion to exceed client expectations by integrating IBM capabilities across functions and international borders.

Jessie Paul

Jessie Paul is the MD of Paul Writer, a marketing advisory firm she founded . Previously, as the CMO of Wipro’s IT business and as Global Brand Manager at Infosys, Jessie has been recognized for putting the Indian IT industry on the global map. Jessie is considered an expert in brand globalization and one of the most influential business women in the Indian IT industry. She has authored a book “No Money Marketing,” which became Tata McGraw-Hill’s fastest selling professional book. She has been a speaker on the topic of brand internationalization at various conferences in India and overseas and is a regular columnist for businessworld.in and Inc India.

Rajiv Ramachandran

Rajiv is head of Securities Trading and Sales Technology in India. He joined Goldman Sachs in 2004 to lead the Equities Technology build-out in Bangalore. In 2008, his role expanded to include coverage of FICC and Equity Derivatives Technology. Rajiv was named managing director in 2010. Prior to joining the firm, Rajiv was a technology consultant at Dresdner Kleinwort, Bank of America and other financial services firms specializing in securities trading applications.

Presenters: Jennifer Anthony, Wipro; Lalitha Js, IBM and Vikram Minocha, Microsoft

Abstract:
This topic targets the Student Community which is ready to take a plunge in the Career World. The objective is to enable the students to gain insight into factors to be considered and be cognizant of, while attending interviews, obtaining job leads & attending job fairs.

This track will help them to 1. Do self-assessment on their interests 2. How to create the right resume/ 1 page profile? 3. How to conduct oneself in a (campus) interview? 4. Job fairs-due diligence, shortlist on set of companies to look for; how do they look for information on companies to make their decisions 5. Common patterns in how various companies do their fresher interviews- aptitude, soft skills etc 6. Common mistakes that people make when they pick jobs 7. Available options & some links for freshers to look for jobs, other than campus placements

The session will comprise of the following: 1. Presentation by a recruitment consultant-Vikram Minocha, Microsoft 2. Presentation by a product domain expert speaker – Lalith Js, IBM 3. Presentation by a services domain expert speaker – Lula Mohanty, IBM 4. Panel discussion comprising the eminent speakers mentioned above, during which they will interact with the audience in a Q&A session

Bios:

Jennifer Anthony

Jennifer has close to 17 years of industry work experience in the Product Engineering Services domain. She is currently associated with Wipro Technologies and has been managing Large Accounts and Offshore Development Centers for key accounts from US and Europe.
Prior to this Jennifer has successfully delivered several challenging projects in the Broadcast and Telecom domain for leading Manufacturers and Telecom Equipment Vendors. She has played a key role in ramping up an Offshore Development Center for Network/Element Management Products for a leading Telecom Product company to more than 150+ members.

In addition to her Program Management responsibilities she has also driven process improvements across her groups. This includes piloting initiatives like Lean practices for adapting in the software context, driving Six Sigma and Agile across her projects. She is an active member of Y’s Menettes (the Women’s wing of Y’s M Group) –Bangalore Club that focuses on services to social causes and building leadership.She is supported by her husband Santosh, and constantly learning from her two daughters Sonia and Sneha.

Lalitha Js

Lalitha has over 15 years of IT industry work experience, out of which the last 4.5 years has been with IBM. She is well experienced in delivering complex software projects, managing cross-functional teams across countries. Lalitha is currently responsible for the Power FW India Functional Test Organization as its Second Line manager. Within IBM, she started off with Java Technology Center, responsible for the mission transfer and management of the development team of IBM Java Class Libraries in India. She is passionate about promoting and developing Women diversity and PwD (People with Disability) and had led several development programs within IBM.

Vikram Minocha

Vikram Manocha has 14 years of industry experience in the IT HR & recruitment space.He has worked both in India as well US with significant experience in Talent acquisition for software products as well as Services companies.He has extensive experience in Staff augmentation, vendor management, executive hiring & onsite-offshore models with deep knowledge of Internet as a recruiting tool.3 years back,he took the role of a Staffing manager in India Development Centre (IDC) where he currently manages the entire lateral industry and campus hiring.With staffing teams in Hyd, Blr & Redmond, his team is responsible for recruiting the top industry talent.

Moderator: Shweta Munjal, Intuit

Panelists: Sumitha Prashanth, HP; Subhathra Srinivasaraghavan, IBM and Krishnamurthy Vaidyanathan, Goldman Sachs

Abstract:
What is your brand? Why do you need a brand? How can you identify and build your brand, without losing your identity? Through this panel discussion, we want to seek answers to some of these questions. Listen to our panelists discuss why brand building and visibility is important and how it affects your career. Learn from their experience, as our panelists share some best practices and common pitfalls to avoid when building your brand. After all, your career is not something that shapes up by chance. You need to take charge of your career, build your own brand and become your own brand ambassador!

Bios:

Shweta Munjal

Shweta has been working in the Corporate Communications sector for close to a decade. She has been with Intuit since December 2010 as Corporate Communications Leader. Shweta is responsible for leading and developing strategic communications plans and tactics for Intuit in India. She engages with internal and external stakeholders to strengthen awareness and understanding of the brand. Prior to Intuit, Shweta has worked with leading brands in helping shape the communication strategy. These include Tesco, Yahoo and NASSCOM. Shweta holds Masters in Mass Communication and Bachelors in Economics from Delhi University.

Sumitha Prashanth

Sumitha Prashanth is a Section Manager at the HP-ISO engineering center. Been in the industry for over 17 years with experience in the Government, Services and product development organization. Has a passion for building leaders and organizations for success. Currently accountable for the High Availability product portfolio on HPUX @ HP. She is driven by the motto Live life to the fullest and make a difference.

Subhathra Srinivasaraghavan

Subhathra Srinivasaraghavan is a Senior Manager with AIX India, IBM India Systems & Technology Lab and leads a group of 80 people working for the AIX Operating System and IBM Power Systems. Subhathra has an experience of over 12 yrs in IBM and has held a variety of technical and management positions. She is passionate about developing people and has personally mentored several technical people and new managers. She is an active contributor in the diversity initiatives of IBM and has personally started multiple networking and mentoring initiatives that help in the development of technical and management leadership in women.

Krishnamurthy Vaidyanathan

Krishnamurthy Vaidyanathan is a Vice President in the Operations Technology division of Goldman Sachs in India. Prior to Goldman Sachs, KV was the global head for Distributed Technology Infrastructure at DTCC, New York. Prior to that, he held senior roles with Lloyds Finance, Unilever and Easy Link. KV also serves on the Board of Directors of the Wall Street Technology Association and on the Customer Advisory Board for HP Software. KV earned a Masters in Technology Management from Columbia University and has a Bachelors degree in Engineering from Bombay University. He lives in Bangalore with his wife and son.

Moderator: Chaitra Bhat, IBM India

Panelists: Charudhattan Nagarajan, IBM, Anuradha Srinivasan, Intel and Susmita Sur-Kolay, Indian Statistical Institute

Abstract:
The electronic products drive the processor/ASIC designs.To be competitive in the market, the current challenge faced by design houses is to achieve higher performance targets, reduce power, integrate more devices on the chip, improve yield and reliability, reduce development cost and achieve fast time to market.

The panel of experts will discuss the challenges, trends in design and methodologies in backend design for high performance chips in 32/22 nm nodes. The design implementation may be different for ASIC/SOC and processor.

What are the submicron effects? How does it impact area, power, timing in 32nm/22 nm?

What are the challenges due to integration and increased density on routing and manufacturability? How is it related to yield and cost? What design, tools and methodologies are required?

How does process variation impact design? What practices in design, tools and methodology are required to account for this in design from the perspective of a> timing b> physical design ?

Bios:

Chaitra Bhat

Chaitra is timing lead in processor department at IBM/India. Her qualification is B.E and M.S (Microelectronics). She has 14 .5 years industry experience. Her experience is in VLSI design – physical design of ASIC/SOC , timing of ASIC/SOC/Processor . She has worked with global teams and clients , enabled India teams and has lead PD/timing on various projects . She is a member of IEEE and ACM, recipient of “Rising Star” award from WOCT and several others from IBM. She holds one patent and has presented at IBM conferences. She is part of IBM tech forums and involved in mentoring.

Charudhattan Nagarajan

Charu is a senior engineer at IBM working on Physical design and timing closure in IBM’s mainframe processors. He has about 16 years of industry experience mostly doing physical design for ASICs and microprocessors. His main interests are methodology development and physical design for high performance microprocessors.

Anuradha Srinivasan

Anuradha Srinivasan is currently a Senior Mgr at Intel and manages the silicon prototyping team in Intel Labs Bangalore . She has about 24yrs of experience in the VLSI field and most of it in VLSI backend . She has worked on designs spanning 1um to 22nm and both analog as well as complex digital chips involving millions of transistors.

Susmita Sur-Kolay

Prof. Susmita Sur-Kolay has contributed in the areas of algorithmic CAD for VLSI physical design, fault modeling and testing, logic synthesis of quantum computers and graph algorithms. She has authored/co-authored over 80 technical papers in international journals ,two edited books and a handbook chapter. She has served on Technical Program Committees of many international conferences. She is a Senior Member of IEEE and a Distinguished Visitor of IEEE Computer Society (India). Among other awards, she was the recipient of the President of India Gold Medal (summa cum laude) at IIT Kharagpur (1980) and IBM Faculty Award (2009).

Moderator: Srujana Merugu, IBM Research

Panelists: Mani Abrol, Vurve Labs; Serene Banerjee, HP Labs; Ranjita Bhagwan, Microsoft Research and Balaji Sivasubramanian, Goldman Sachs

Abstract:
Google provides answers to our queries, Amazon suggests us what to buy, Facebook finds us friends and Shaadi/e-Harmony even soul-mates. The tremendous advances in computing and infrastructure technologies have led to unprecedented automation, in turn, resulting in algorithms having an outsized influence on the decision making of individuals and the society. Events such as the 2008 market crash, user-studies on long term use of search engines, and possibly the reduction in human cognitive effort with each new web 2.0/3.0 application are creating increased awareness of the power of the algorithms.

The goal of this session is to inform the audience on the nature of algorithms, the immense power these “CS-Mathy” things offer humanity, why they are an absolute necessity in our increasingly complex lives, what the future beholds, and also offer multiple expert perspectives on how to responsibly deal with them to ensure they remain a force for societal benefit.

Bios:

Srujana Merugu

Srujana Merugu (Ph.D., University of Texas, Austin; B.Tech., IIT Madras) is a researcher with Human Language Technologies Department at IBM Research, India. Prior to IBM, she was with the Machine Learning group at Yahoo! Research, Santa Clara. Her research interests include learning with graphical models, information theory, modeling of large scale multi-relational data, information extraction, and social networks. She has published in several top venues on data mining such as KDD, SDM, ICML, JMLR and is the recipient of five best paper awards. She has also served on the program committee of KDD, SDM, AAAI, UAI, ICML and WWW.

Mani Abrol
Mani Abrol (M.S., University of Maryland, B.Tech, Punjab Engineering College) is the head of Vurve Labs, a Silicon Valley based startup. Prior to this, she led the research engineering team at Yahoo! Labs, Bangalore, where she was responsible for building and mentoring a smart team of engineers to solve tough technical problems. Before Yahoo !, she spent almost 8 years at Verity, an enterprise search company based in Mountain View, where she was a principal architect and manager of the parametric search team. Her technical interests include information extraction, information retrieval, computational advertising, and large scale architectures.

Serene Banerjee

Serene Banerjee is a Senior Research Scientist at HP Labs, India, working on Document Image Processing. Prior to joining HP Labs, India, she worked on image/video processing algorithms in Texas Instruments, India, Inc. and Intel, Inc. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004. Her dissertation was on composition guided image acquisition for digital still cameras. She holds 2 patent applications, 2 refereed journal papers, 14 refereed conference papers in the image/video processing area and one contribution in the JPEG 2000 standard. She is a member of the IEEE.

Ranjita Bhagwan
Ranjita Bhagwan is a researcher at the Mobility, Networks and Systems group at Microsoft Research India. Previously, she was a research staff member at IBM T. J. Watson Research in Hawthorne, NY, USA. Prior to that, she completed my PhD in 2004 from the University of California at San Diego. Her interests are mainly in solving problems related to Networking and Distributed Systems.

Balaji Sivasubramanian
Balaji is a vice president in Equities Trading Technology in Goldman Sachs, India. He manages the Electronic Trading and Equities Core technology group in Bangalore. Balaji primarily focuses on defining and executing strategies on high speed computing and algorithmic trading of equities across various markets and liquidity venues globally. He chairs the Lateral Hiring committee in Bangalore and has been instrumental in driving initiatives to enhance diversity. Balaji has a Masters in Physics from IIT Kanpur and spent his first four years in Citigroup prior to joining Goldman Sachs.

Presenters: Lalitha Visali Pannala, IBM India Software Lab

Abstract:
The performance maps of all products we see in the enterprise application environment, show metrics in a two-dimensional data representation. This lacks in the aspects of 1. Data Interpretation – Is the data good or bad ? 2. Density – How good or how bad is the data? As a consequence, the performance analyst has to mentally collate the metrics of various components and arrive at an overall performance snapshot. A heatmap visualization of the performance metrics, alongside the customized business rules on which the color-ation depends, fills these gaps in the performance metrics representation. A heat map is a graphical representation of two dimensional data (X, Y and Value) by using colors, color-ation depending on business rules. Heat maps are good at representing large number of data points in ways that would be unwieldy and hard to interpret using traditional tables or charts and allow users quickly visualize density.

Bios:

Lalitha Visali Pannala

Lalitha Visali Pannala has over 15 years of IT experience with JavaEE-based Product design, development, support and management. Currently, she is a Development Manager for the WebSphere Application Server portfolio at IBM India Software Labs, Bangalore, handling the technical design review aspects of the delivery, project planning and execution, and has contributed to the product delivery.

Lalitha has presented on the WebSphere products at several technical events at IBM and Sun, some of which are WTC, Develethon, dw-Unconference, SOA & Cloud Event, dwLive, OpenGroup India, JavaONE etc. Her paper submissions got selected twice for JavaONE world-wide conference, held at San Francisco.

Moderator: Anjana Vivek, VentureBean Consulting

Panelists: Revathy Ashok, Iris Consulting; Bharati Jacob, Seedfund; Vani Kola, IndoUS Venture Partners; Vijaya Verma, Yos Technologies

Abstract:
What does it take to successfully raise capital for a start-up in India?

You will get to hear from experts on this topic, all of whom have impressive backgrounds: Bharati Jacob is a Founder Partner at Seedfund, an early stage venture-capital firm; Vani Kola is MD, IndoUS Venture Partners, an early to mid-stage venture capital firm; Vijaya Verma is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Yos Technologies; Revathy Ashok is Founder, Iris Consulting and a member of the Indian Angel Network.

Find out the different avenues for funding, the key elements that investors look for in prospective companies, and the different stages in which they invest. Learn about valuation, due diligence, regulatory issues and what you should be wary of. Gather some statistics of companies that are getting funded in today’s environment right from the horse’s mouth.

Enjoy the dialogue as Anjana Vivek discusses these topics and more with her fellow panelists.

Bios:

Anjana Vivek

Anjana is a consultant, teacher and writer. She works with new ventures, growth companies and VCs; providing inputs on business and action plans, business & financial models and advisory services related to valuation, M&A planning and financial strategy.

Prior to her current role, she was a full-time faculty member in the Finance and Control Area at IIMB. Other positions held by her include COO of NSRCEL, i.e. the entrepreneurship Centre at IIMB and Vice President at Ernst & Young. Anjana is a Chartered Accountant with a B.Sc. (Honours) degree in Physics from Delhi University.

Revathy Ashok

* Consultant, mentor mid/early stage companies, helping them scale. Member IAN, made five investments, involved in IAN’s Incubator, mix of start up, scaling, operating, investing experience.

* Previously MD, Tishman Speyer, Global PE Fund, set up India operations, oversaw investments USD 150 Mn over four years. As CFO Syntel, Microland Groups, raised capital from marquee investors, set up Tyco Electronics India, articulated strategic direction for expansion through acquisitions, JVs, Middle East operations.

* On Boards of Welspun, ADC, Stelae etc.,TiE GC Member. Gold medalist IIM-B, Dataquest in 2005 named her one of 10 most powerful women in Indian IT industry.

Bharati Jacob

Bharati Jacob is the Founder-Partner of Seedfund. She brings over 24 years of diverse and rich experience in venture investing, marketing and financial services. She began her investing career with Infinity Venture Fund as part of the start up team. Prior to Infinity, she was head of the investment bank Lazard in South India and established Lazard offices in Chennai and Bangalore. Her responsibilities included operations and business development with P&L responsibility.

Bharati graduated from Wharton, University of Pennsylvania. She is currently on the Board of redBus, Vaatsalya Healthcare and EduSports. Bharati is an active charter member of TiE.

Vani Kola

Vani is the Managing Director of IndoUS Venture Partners (IUVP), a leading early-stage VC Fund in India. She co-founded IUVP and moved back to India in 2006 to set up the Fund’s operations. Vani serves on the boards of VIA, SeventyMM, Myntra, Jasper, Apalya, India Plaza and Onward Mobility.

Vani also has a distinguished entrepreneurial background. She holds a Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Electrical Engineering.

Vani is a prominent speaker at various events around the country. She has been profiled in numerous books. She is also involved in various organizations focused on fostering entrepreneurship and women leadership.

Vijaya Verma

Vijaya Verma is a technologist and serial entrepreneur. Her 25 year experience in the IT industry spans technical design, market and business development, capital raising and technology evangelization.

Currently she is the founder and CEO of Yos Technologies, a uniquely positioned company in the Healthcare IT space. Prior to this, she founded Alopa Networks, one of the earliest companies providing end to end OSS product solutions in the broadband space. Earlier, as GM in Wipro, Vijaya handled various responsibilities including heading its Product Division.

Vijaya holds a Masters Degree from IIT Bombay. She is a member of TiE Bangalore, and a frequent speaker on subjects related to technology, leadership, & entrepreneurship.

Presenters: Shweta Shandilya and Manasa Rao, IBM

Abstract:
Developing nations like India are gradually emerging as major information hub. India is the second largest populated country and as well as one of the fastest growing economy in the world. Since these economies are growing, huge investment is being put into understanding the market and the growth trends. All global reputed brand has a store in India and they want to capitalize on the growth in these countries. As a result these nations are realizing the importance of data that needs to be collected and maintained. But due to huge amounts of data and ever increasing information sources there is a great challenge ahead of them in maintaining their data quality. Any solution that needs to be built for Customer Hub or Analytics, the data quality is very important quotient.The speakers will talk about issues with respect to data quality and some of the good practices that could be followed.

Bios:

Manasa Rao

Manasa K. Rao works with IBM.ISL Labs. She has very deep understanding of data quality issues that we have in India and other growing economies.She has worked on many projects involving IBM InfoSphere QualityStage and has been certified as IBM InfoSphere QualityStage Developer. She has authored papers and publications on the issues with Data Quality and successfully worked with some of the customers like SBI, CBI etc to solve their Data issues.

Shweta Shandilya

Shweta works as Project Manager in IBM India Software Labs, Bangalore. She has 12 years of software development and lead experience working with products in ISL and significant amount of experience with customers and support teams. Currently Shweta manages product development team for IBM Product. Earlier she was working as a Product Architech for the same product. She also leads a diversity group for one of the brands within IBM called “Shakti”. Shweta holds a BE degree from NIIT, Patna. As an Architect role some of her ideas have become a part of the product and converted into paper publications.

Moderator: Smitha Lahiri, Intel

Panelists: Usha Jamadagni, ACS, A Xerox Company; Alka Manchanda, Independent; Vidya Nagaraj, Oracle and Nita Sharma, FairIsaac Corporation

Abstract:
Are leaders born or made? Is leadership innate or can be learned? What attributes are genetic, what can be learned? These are questions that have drawn the attention of a lot of researchers over the years and have resulted in the emergence of various schools of thoughts. The panel engages in an informal analysis of genetic abilities vis-à-vis personal effort, skills and learning while sharing examples from their own successes and giving insights into becoming a leader.

Bios:

Smitha Lahiri

Smitha Lahiri is a Delivery Manager in the Supply Network Capability at Intel Bangalore. She has been with Intel for over twelve years, having worked in the Telecommunications and Embedded organization and Intel IT. She currently leads a team responsible for the delivery of applications that enable the Supply planning processes at Intel. Her career of software application delivery spanning sixteen years has been across enterprise solutions, telecommunications and e-Governance. She has worked with CMC Limited prior to joining Intel.

Usha Jamadagni

Usha is a dynamic and accomplished IT executive with over 19 years of proven leadership experience in a global environment and is currently the Director for Service Delivery at ACS, A Xerox company. She has been in various leadership roles with varied degrees of scope ranging from leading customer Implementations, program management, transition management, resource management and service delivery and as customer ambassador for some very big accounts. As a person, Usha is very passionate about her work, has great people connect factor and well organized and process driven. She has an MS from PACE University, NY.

Alka Manchanda

Alka Manchanda was formerly Director of Engineering, leading the Voice Technology Group product development for Cisco in India. Her responsibilities included leading the software development, test, documentation and product marketing organizations for IP Communications BU and Contact Center BU in India. As the VTG lead in India, she was responsible for interfacing with customers, sales teams and partners to understand and deliver features and solutions for the local and global Unified Communications market. Alka has Bachelor degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Smith College (Northampton, MA) and a Masters in Computer Science from the University of New Hampshire (Durham NH).

Vidya Nagaraj

Vice President, Product Management and Service, Oracle University, Oracle Vidya Nagaraj has around 20 years of experience that spans various areas such as Technical training, Instructional Design and Curriculum Development. Vidya Nagaraj is a Vice President with Oracle University and manages their Products & Services teams in India. Vidya was a part of the start-up team for the Oracle India Development Center. She was instrumental in setting up training programs and processes to help ramp up and establish the Oracle Development Centers in Bangalore and Hyderabad.

Nita Sharma

Dr. Nita Sharma is Director, Software Engineering at FairIsaac Corporation (FICO). FICO delivers superior predictive analytics solutions that drive smarter decisions. Nita currently leads the Platform team responsible for building common components for the FICO application suite. Nita’s 19 year career includes several leadership roles – as a technical leader as well as in engineering management. Her experience includes work at software startups (Icarian, Broadvision, ncube) and Intuit. Nita has a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University, a Master’s from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and a BE (Electrical and Electronics Engineering) from BITS (Pilani).

Moderator: Sulagna Ganguly, CA Technologies

Panelists: Nivedita Aggarwal, CA Technologies; Srujana Merugu; IBM Research and Usha Sampath, Intel

Abstract:
Fresh graduates with a job in hand wonder who to approach to know the industry and the job better. The session, with a panel of mentors, will address the many questions that go unanswered. A common platform to bring together the mentors and the mentees, the discussion will highlight the role of mentoring for development and advancement and answer questions like:

• Why do I need a mentor? • How does one go about selecting a mentor? • What are the areas in which women need mentoring? • Should the mentee commit to some outcome of the program in the beginning so the mentor/mentee can come up with a plan? • What are the challenges of remote mentoring? • What areas can mentoring address and help improve? • How is sponsorship different from mentorship? How is it beneficial?

So, if you are a student, this session can be a platform for you to ask all those questions about mentoring that you didn’t know who to ask. For professionals interested in mentoring, the discussion will provide insights on what mentees expect out of mentors. Additionally, interested participants will be matched with mentors towards the end of the session and will get to have a few minutes of one-on-one time with a mentor to discuss their specific issues.

Bios:

Sulagna Ganguly

Presently a Technical Writer, Sulagna comes with three years experience in writing for Website, social media, and managing content development team. An English graduate, she has worked as an editor with a UK-based media house and language consultant with Ernst & Young prior to CA Technologies. A passionate communicator, she did courses in mentoring, training & development, and communication skills as part of her post-graduation.Her interest lies in social media marketing, communication, training, management, and content development.

Nivedita Aggarwal

Nivedita is a Director at CA Technologies (India) with a team size of over 60. With more than 11 years of experience in the IT industry, including 6+ years in various management roles, her responsibilities varied from training, user documentation, people, project, and operations management. Nivedita ideated and led several process initiatives that resulted in significant operational cost savings for the organization. Nivedita is also an active participant in Women Leaders in CA ITC forum and GHC; she was a panelist in GHC 2010 India Conference. She is also credited with giving presentations at the STC (Society for Technical Communicators) India Annual conferences.

Srujana Merugu
Srujana Merugu is a researcher with the Human Language Technologies Department at IBM Research, New Delhi. She received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas at Austin and her B.Tech degree from IIT Madras. Prior to joining IBM, she was a research scientist in the Machine Learning group at Yahoo! Research, Santa Clara and briefly affiliated with Yahoo! Labs, Bangalore as well. Her research interests include learning and inference over graphical models, information theory, predictive modeling of large scale multi-relational data, information extraction, and social information systems. She has published in several top venues on data mining/machine learning.

Usha Sampath

Ms. Usha Sampath manages the Enterprise Application Development in Intel. She graduated in Electronics and Communication Engineering from College of Engineering, Guindy, University of Madras in 1983. She has 28 years of experience in the IT industry and 10 years at Intel. She has managed global development teams and managed several customer accounts in the US and Europe. She started her career as Embedded Software Engineer and moved on to development and deployment of Enterprise Software solutions. She has managed organizations delivering IT solutions to the various business domains like Industrial Automation, Supply Chain Management, and Sales & Marketing.

Co-Moderators: Nanditha Iyer, Georgia Tech and Samvedna Jha, IBM

Panelists: Anuradha A, Infosys; Mamatha Nath, IBM; Kavitha Rao, Siksha;

Abstract:
An interactive brain storming session to discuss workplace challenges.

In the complex situation of today, can we understand the workplace challenges at workplace and use them as opportunities?
What are the choices in challenging times – give up, run away, hide, face it, accept it, fight it or negotiate?
How can we make effective choices to deal with challenges effectively?
Can lack of knowledge and exposure hinder or limit our ability to make the choices?
Can we discuss the challenges and explore possible options, approaches and solutions?
Can we know what has worked for others and use them to make a breakthrough for our own careers?

Esteemed panellists of this interactive session are going to address the relevant questions on how to overcome the challenges we face at workplace. You will leave this workshop with tips to getting your career off on the right foot by dealing with various challenges.

Bios:

Nanditha Iyer

Nanditha Iyer is currently pursuing master’s in Computer Science at Georgia Tech, Atlanta. Her specialization includes systems. Prior to this she was a financial software engineer in D.E.Shaw & Co, Hyderabad for two years. She holds Bachelor’s in Computer Science from PESIT, Bangalore. She held several leadership roles such as member on the advisory board of ABI, active role in the planning committee of GHC India and ambassador of ABI. She has attended and participated in GHC India and US since 2010. Nanditha has a passion for technology and wants a career in technical field. She enjoys reading, cooking and travelling.

Samvedna Jha

Samvedna Jha holds a Masters in Computer Application. She is currently Technical Lead in IBM POWER Systems team, which is part of global Systems & Technology Division of IBM. She has over 8 years of Network and Systems management and is known for her focus on high quality and efficiency. She is leading efforts in IBM’s Women In Technology chapter that works towards women empowerment of women employees . She has presented papers at various IBM’s technical forums and holds 3 publications at ip.com. Samvedna is an active contributor to all Diversity Events.

Anuradha A

Anuradha is a Delivery Manager with the Independent Validation Solutions, Infosys Technologies Limited. She manages a large testing portfolio spread across global locations and deals with multiple customers in the Manufacturing, and High Tech Sectors. She has authored multiple whitepapers . She anchored the New Engagement Models Initiative which won an excellence award . She is a Bachelor of Engineering, has over 19+ years of experience . She has worked extensively in Energy, Utilities, High Tech and Telecom domains and has hands on experience in large testing transformation programs, test strategizing, Consulting, test automation to execution.

Mamatha Nath

Mamatha R Nath is Global Learning Program Manager & Business Operations Leader for Growth Markets in Leadership Development Pillar, IBM. She is a clinical psychologist by qualification & a learning professional by passion. Before joining IBM she was practicing psychology & counselling. Over past 4 & half years in IBM, she has pursued various roles within Learning Team. She has been awarded ‘Top Facilitator’ & ‘Rising Star’ . Mamatha was an active theater personality with many National awards . She is also an AIR artist. With 13 years of work experience in various roles. she also has an adorable… happy family!

Kavitha Rao

Kavitha Rao is the VP of the Siksha Group. She has rich experience in the field of OE, Learning and Development, both in India and USA. Her core strengths include designing learning initiatives, workshops,defining process, use of use of evaluation tools . Prior to Siksha, she has been associated with various organizations in India and USA on training and diversity issues for the organizations. Kavitha has a Master’s degree in Medical psychiatric social work . She is one of the very few to be awarded by SHRM for “HR Next” initiative. She has an HR diploma from California State University.

Presenters: Pooja Dixit and Vishakha Vaidya, Adobe Systems

Abstract:
Web technologies are now experiencing rapid development. With the workshop we intend to showcase newer development in web technology like HTML5/CSS3 and go deeper with hands on session. The panel will throw light on html 5/css3 and it’s importance in web world, how it differs from flash followed by demo of top features of these technologies and building an interactive website with these features.

Experience an hands on contest to build prototype website from scratch where attendees are welcome to try it on their own, they can choose their favorite tools for developing
and can win exciting prizes!!

Bios:

Pooja Dixit

She is working in Adobe since last 3 years. She has contributed to Adobe Contributor and Adobe Normalizer as a core developer. She is quite passionate about technology and has a keen interest in web technologies. At leisure she loves to listen music and read non-fictional books.

Vishakha Vaidya

She works as a Computer Scientist in Adobe. She has an overall experience of 12 years which includes around 6 years of developing tools related to web technologies. She is a part of Dreamweaver core engineering team and loves to stay on top of new technologies. She holds 1 patent and several accepted feature ideas to her credit. The adjectives that best describe her are, programmer and ideator.

Presenter: Malar Karumalai, CA Technologies

Anu Vaidyanathan, PatNMarks – Cancelled

Abstract:
IPRs can be useful for a variety of ends including Intellectual Branding, which is the hallmark of innovative companies such as Apple Computer. Starting as far back as the 13th century, several formal trade monopolies were established in the world. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the history of ideas juxtaposed with modern Intellectual Property Rights as we know them today and the debates around these rights that are relevant to us. Answers to questions like what has changed, what is changing, what is becoming invalid and so on. Most of the audience produce copyright material software source code, technical papers; do semiconductor design; produce fabric designs; sometimes inventions do not get qualified for patenting but there may be other ways to protect the IP in that idea. Many audiences are not aware that what they produce is IP. What qualifies for IP, what are the owners’ rights, how to get protection? The session could answer such questions and bring awareness about these in the audience.

Bio:

Malar Karumalai
Malar Karumalai is a software architect at CA Technologies. Malar has 19 years of experience in computing. Started as school teacher, then teaching at college, followed by 8 years as Scientist/Engineer at ISRO, Bangalore, Malar has contributed significantly to mission data processing software, and held positions as Project Manager and Deputy Operations Director of for ResourceSat satellite. At CA, Malar has been contributing to various products in Storage, Records Management, Compliance, IT Client automation and doing successful knowledge transfers. Malar is a registered patent agent, holds diplomas in cyber law and Intellectual property Law. Malar is also an e-mentor.

Moderator: Parul Gupta, IBM

Panelists: Veni Mahadevan, IISc; Mangala Gowri Nanda, IBM Research; Ranjani Narayan, Morphing Machines, Pvt Ltd and Nidhi Rajshree, IBM

Abstract:
Scientists and technologists claim that science and technology is gender neutral. Yet, men continue to dominate the technology world. So men get the more challenging jobs, like internet content designers and providers, programmers and systems analysts, researchers, policy makers… while women tend to remain concentrated in low-paying sectors of the workforce.

* Do you think higher education can help?

* What are the issues that keep more women from pursuing higher studies?

Voice your opinion at this Birds-of-a-Feather session.

Bio:

Parul Gupta

Parul currently works with IBM Research and is the technical lead for the Wireless Network Cloud project team in India. Her research interests include everything about wireless communication systems, and she has worked on algorithms spanning physical-layer, MIMO systems, medium access control, and cross-layer routing protocols. She has a B.Tech. and M.S. in electrical engineering from IIT, Bombay and UCLA respectively.

Besides technology, Parul is passionate about social issues, especially how technology can help alleviate them. She co-founded NGOPost.org and received the Foundation of Youth Social Entrepreneurship’s Paragon100 fellowship for 2009-10 (given to 100 changemakers in Asia-Pacific under 30yrs).

Veni Mahadevan

Prof. C.E. Veni Madhavan is a professor in the Computer Science and Automation department of IISc. His interests are in algorithms, cryptography and cognitive science. He has published over 70 papers, delivered over 100 invited talks, guided 14 PhD, 10 MS and 80 ME theses. In 2001, he was awarded by the Mathematical Association of India, for distinguished services in mathematics education and research. In 2011, IISc awarded him for excellence in research in engineering. He obtained his PhD from IISc, ME from Pilani and BE from Madras. He was Director of a DRDO laboratory for three years (on lien).

Mangala Gowri Nanda

Mangala Gowri Nanda is a Senior Researcher at IBM Research, India. Her technical work involves inter-procedural static and dynamic analysis of programs 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 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, until the call of academics sent her back to complete a PhD in Computer Science from IIT BSombay. Subsequently she joined IBM.

Ranjani Narayan

Ranjani Narayan is the CTO of Morphing Machines, Pvt Ltd, a semiconductor startup engaged in the design, development and deployment of Reconfigurable Silicon Cores. She obtained her PhD from the Indian Institute of Science in 1989, and BE (Hons) from the Indian Institute of Science in 1980. Prior to joining Morphing Machines, she worked in Hewlett Packard as an Architect and has several years of experience in OS, System Diagnostics, and Self Healing Systems. She has many publications in Journals and proceedings of International Conferences to her credit. Her research interests include Processor Architectures, Heterogeneous Multi-cores Architectures, Embedded SoCs and Reconfigurable Silicon Cores.

Nidhi Rajshree

Nidhi Rajshree is a Software Engineer working with the Infrastructure Management Services Group in IBM, India Research Labs. She is working on the “Cockpit” project that aims to define a new Governance model which actively empowers Citizens in Public Service Delivery decision making process. Cockpit combines the research areas of citizens’ opinion mining in the context of Web 2.0, enhances Service Science Management Engineering and encourages engagement of citizens for forming informed judgements on public services delivery.

Nidhi completed her Masters in Information Technology from IIIT, Bangalore. Her research interests include Service Science, Model Driven Architecture and User Centric Design.

S Sadagopan

Professor Sadagopan, Director of IIIT-Bangalore, is a product of Madras University, India and Purdue University, USA. He taught for 25+ years at IIT Kanpur, IIM Bangalore, IIT Madras and IIIT-Bangalore in addition to short teaching assignments at RUTGERS, USA and AIT, Bangkok. He has wide research interests that include Operations Research, Multi-criteria optimization Decision Theory, Simulation, Enterprise Computing, Programming Languages, Databases, Multimedia and e-Governance.

He has authored seven books, several book chapters and papers. He is also a Fellow of IEE (UK) and Computer Society of India. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, ACM and AIS. He also writes extensively for the popular press; he is a featured Columnist for Times of India.

Presenters: Lalitha Ravisankaran, Goldman Sachs and Yashavanthi Renukaswamy, IBM

Abstract:
If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint”, then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced – Vincent Van Gogh

We all have inner voices which is our major driving force. There arise millions of questions and uncertainties before venturing into doing something different. If those million questions are part of goal planning, risk assessment etc., they all sound very valid. Often, for most of us women, be it in technology or otherwise, this is not the case. One BIG “?” becomes the very prima facie – Can I really do this? What makes us bow down to the inner voice and give up even before taking the plunge? What do we do next? How do we change our inner-dialogues?

Come and experience the way you can tame your inner-voice – the new inner-voice that guides you towards your dream!

Bios:

Lalitha Ravisankaran

Lalitha is Vice President & Chief of Staff for the head of application development in Goldman Sachs India. She is responsible for divisional strategy, business unit management and for “telling technology’s financial story better. She has also led cross divisional efforts on due diligence in the M&A space from Bangalore. She serves on theTech Career Development Committee and chairs the India Women in Technology Forum. Lalitha was one of the founding members of the Investment Banking Division efforts in Bangalore in 2004 and transitioned in 2008 to Technology to serve her current role. Lalitha holds an MBA in Finance from JNTU and is a certified cost accountant.

Yashavanthi Renukaswamy

Yashavanthi Renukaswamy is a staff software engineer at IBM India Pvt. Ltd. in the QA department and is a certified Advanced Database Administrator. She has been with IBM for the past 7 years and has worked at HP and Dharma systems prior to IBM. She has over 11 years of experience in QA and has taught computers for 4 years. She has presented technical papers at different forums and has been an active member in University programs and Academic Initiatives. She is passionate about motivating her team and seeing that they succeed.

Moderator: Savita Kini, Cisco Systems India Pvt Ltd

Panelists: Kamalika Bhattacharya, Ptotem Learning Projects; Chitra Hariharan, Concept2Silicon; Uma Reddy, M/S Hitech Magnetics and Shanti Subbaraman, Emulex Corp;

Abstract:
Women as technology entrepreneurs have been very few globally though women have been running all kinds of small entrepreneurial ventures for ages across all cultures and countries. Women technology entrepreneurs often face far more challenges than their male counterparts both in terms of the ecosystem which supports them to fund raising to reaching out to their customers. Some women have taken this risky path, not only become successful but are contributing and giving back to society. In this session, we will learn from successful women entrepreneurs 1.What motivated them to take this off-beaten track? 2.What were some of the challenges they face? 3.How did they raise money for their venture? 4.How they measured their success internally and externally? 5.What skills were important for them while they juggled the changing roles/responsibilities in an early stage start-up? 6.What kind of support they received which was very critical? 7.What keeps them going?

Bios:

Savita Kini

Savita Kini is a Solutions Marketing Manager at Cisco responsible for bringing new emerging solutions in Healthcare to market globally. She brings 15 years of experience in R&D, Marketing, and business strategies. Savita began her engineering career in ATM, Optical & Ethernet switching, with Cisco San Jose in 1998. She has also worked in MindTree, Tonse Telecom, and as startup advisor in marketing, and strategy roles. She is an 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.

Kamalika Bhattacharya

Kamalika Bhattacharya is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Ptotem Learning Projects (since 2009), an education technology firm creating games, models and simulations as aids for learning and assessment. She was involved from ground up in conceptualization, design, regulatory approvals, business development and service delivery. Kamalika has 10 years experience in the financial services industry, which includes investment banking, private equity and research in companies such as IDFC-SSKI, ICRA and ADP India. She received her bachelor’s from Indian Institute of Management and Commerce and post-graduate in business from Indian School of Business in Hyderabad.

Chitra Hariharan

Chitra Hariharan brings 25 years of experience in semiconductor industry. At Concept2Silicon Systems, she is responsible for Silicon Engineering operations. Prior to co-founding Concept2Silicon Systems, Chitra was core team member of three start-ups – Open-Silicon, Intel Microelectronics and RealChip Communications, and was instrumental in building of highly successful engineering organizations. Her team at Open-Silicon was awarded the “Best Design Team” by EETimes. While at VLSI design centre of Indian Telephone Industries, she designed chips for prestigious indigenous projects. Chitra has been invited panellist on multiple technical forums and EDA user group events. She graduated from University of Madras and pursued a custom executive management program from IIM, Bangalore, India.

Uma Reddy

Ms. Uma Reddy is a first generation technology entrepreneur running a SME M/S Hitech Magnetics & Electronics Pvt Ltd., manufacturing custom built transformers, coils, inductors and electronic sub assemblies. Her company has won many Performance Awards from the Indian government and global MNCs. Uma has won awards including Karnataka Rajyotsava award in 2005 for her contribution to society. She is a sought after speaker on entrepreneurship development in national and international forums. Uma has held leadership roles in various organisations for women entrepreneurs and SME sector, organising many programs and seminars on technology manufacturing in India and women entrepreneur development.

Shanti Subbaraman

Shanti Subbaraman heads the Bangalore development centre of Emulex Corporation. Shanti co-founded Aarohi Communications (acquired by Emulex), a venture-backed company pioneering innovation in the Storage Area Networking space. With 25 years of experience in software engineering and management, Shanti set up and managed centers of cutting-edge IT engineering in India for global companies. Shanti began her career with Digital Equipment Corporation in the US and moved to India in nineties with Digital India. Besides engineering, Shanti is an avid adventurer and musician. Shanti has B. Tech (Electrical Engineering) from IIT Madras and M.S. (Computer Science) from University of Oregon.

Presenters: Cheryl Aranha, Apparna Ramadoss and Vidya Sridharan from Intuit

Abstract:

It is said that success breeds success. Is this true? Is success a random phenomenon or is it something on which we can apply the same design principles of software modeling and go on to replicate? Or should success be treated as a niche area? This one hour session will provide a brief overview of Intuit’s core practice of “Design for Delight” – D4D, followed by a design workshop with a few problem statements around ‘Success for Women’. The participants will have the opportunity to learn about these principles, by putting them to practice with a ‘Design for Successful Women’. D4D is the core Intuit principle to develop products and services that delight users and encourage them to share their positive experiences with others.The workshop would provide a stimulating environment that helps generate innovative, high impact ideas to co-create solutions for real life and thereby help in design for success.

Bios:

Cheryl Aranha

Cheryl joined Intuit 3 years ago as a college hire from NITK, Surathkal. Today, she enjoys working with the QuickBooks Desktop team- where her ability to understand the product and customer requirement backed with strong technical knowledge enables her to design and implement solutions for millions of customers. She is also an Innovation Catalyst, a part of the Agile Community and a recipient of the Intuit India Award. She has also played an active part in TechForum, CToF and Hackday events at Intuit.She believes that Teaching, Art, Music and Dance bring a new dimension to her life.

Apparna Ramadoss

Apparna has 14 years of experience in delivering customer focused software solutions. She started as an Individual Contributor and recently shifted back to management and now is a Sr. Development Manager for the Data Analytics team for QuickBooks. After working in US for 10+ years, she moved back to India 2 years back and continues to contribute to Intuit’s Innovation Catalyst program. She recently won Innovation Catalyst Community award.Before Intuit, she worked in a start up called ArrowEye Solutions where she grew from an individual contributor to a Director role.In her tenure, she tripled the number of customers for ArrowEye.

Vidya Sridharan

Vidya Sridharan is the Head of Engineering for Platform group at Intuit. She has about 20 years experience in various challenging roles including leading engineering and product management teams in companies such as Intuit, Mcafee, Impelsys and Oracle Corp. Vidya has spent 10 years as a Motivational Trainer and lead Women Executives Forums. Being a passionate and hard core computer engineer she has also done her MBA from NTU Singapore and UC Berkeley with a specialization in APAC markets. Vidya is truly passionate about women leadership in technology and has changed many women’s careers and mindsets towards this.