Moderator: Preethi Ramesh, IIT Bombay

Panelists: Krishnashree Achuthan, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham (Cancelled); Kalika Bali, Microsoft Research India; Kadambari Devarajan, FOSS; Supriya Kannery, India Systems and Technology Labs; Bhooshan Kelkar, IBM India Pvt. Ltd and Anjali Sardana, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee

Abstract:
The fundamental objective of this session is to help students get involved in innovation and open source during undergraduate and graduate levels. How do students conceive an idea and put it into action? How can they exhibit innovation in the undergrad level? In this context, students should be made aware of plagiarism and violation of IP rights and patents. Also, the importance of choosing an area of interest and submitting the final year thesis on it hasn’t been given the seriousness it requires. Panelists will give tips on choosing an area of innovation, writing a good paper and publishing in an international conference . The importance of undergraduate students involving themselves in Open source coding contests and internships must will also be handled by panelists from FOSS industry.This panel should aim at giving the students a clear view on all the above issues.
Bios:

Preethi Ramesh

Preethi Ramesh is currently a research assistant at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay working on virtualization. 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.

Krishnashree Achuthan (Cancelled)

Dr. Krishnashree Achuthan is currently serving as Co-Chair of International Initiatives at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham. She is also the Principal Investigator for the MHRD’s National Mission project (VALUE – Virtual and Accessible Laboratories Universalizing Education) at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham. Her research interests are diverse inclusive of cognitive studies, multimedia in education, pedagogy, technologies for education, computer security, cloud computing etc. Passionate about promoting entrepreneurial skills and nurturing creative and innovative minds, she serves as the CEO of Amrita Technology Business Incubator.

Kalika Bali

Kalika Bali is a researcher in the Multilingual Systems Group in Microsoft Research India. Her research interests lie in Speech and Language Technology for Education, NLP and Speech technology for Indian Languages, and Linguistic Resources and Standards for NLP/Speech. She is currently involved in Psycholinguistic experiment designs for Cognitive Models of Language Processing.

Kadambari Devarajan

Kadambari (aka KD) is a computer scientist by training and her research involves applying tenets of computer science to visualize and analyze scientific data. She is a data geek who likes to study wildlife and animal behavior, and combine her love for field work and ethoecology with free/open source tools. She used to be a sysadmin for LinuxChix-India (LCIN) and is a member of many other communities and mailinglists, including Ubuntu-Women, ILUGC, ILUG-BOM, FSF-India, GeekFeminism, and BangPypers. She was part of the organizing committee for the first two ‘Scientific Computing with Python’ conferences in India, Scipy.in 2009 and 2010.

Supriya Kannery

Supriya Kannery works for Linux Technology Centre at IBM. She has got 14 years of Industry experience and has expertise on various software emulation and virtualization technologies. She started her career with IBM’s emulation software for mainframes where she contributed to planning, design, development and support of the product. Later she moved to Linux Technology Centre where she has been contributing to planning, development, verification and support of Linux applications as well as Linux kernel components. Since 2009, she has been working on enabling the open hypervisor – KVM (Kernel Based VirtualMachine), for IBM Cloud solutions.

Bhooshan Kelkar

Dr. Bhooshan Kelkar has a professional experience of more than 15 years. He has been with IBM for more than 10 years, in the US and India, Bhooshan holds a B.Tech. from IIT Bombay (1991), MS (1992) and PhD (1995) from the UK, along with a Bioinformatics Certification (2002) from University of California and a Certificate in IP Law (2008) from Watson Research Training Center, NY. He has also completed MBTI certification from NY in 2011. He holds 7 US patents in multiple technologies. He has been nominated for the “IBM Master Inventor” title for 2011.

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.

Moderator: Ranjana Goswami, CA Technologies

Panelists: Malarvizhi Karumalai, CA Technologies; Sudha Nagarajan, Brocade Communications and Khushboo Taneja, Microsoft

Abstract:
After the first few years in your career you automatically start thinking about “Where am I headed? What’s the next big thing? How do I grow in my career? ” Industry studies show that women don’t make this transition to the next level in their career as easily as men do.

Catalyst study says “Women’s representation has not grown significantly in corporate boardrooms, executive office suites, or the ranks of companies’ top earners in the last year, according to the 2010 Catalyst Census: Fortune 500 Women Board Directors and the 2010 Catalyst Census: Fortune 500 Women Executive Officers and Top Earners “ -Research from the 2011 Grant Thornton International Business Report (IBR) reveals that women currently hold 20% of senior management positions globally

“What next? How to grow?” are going to address relevant questions on how to make the transition to the next stage in your career past the newbie stage?

Bios:

Ranjana Goswami

Ranjana is a Manager in the Technical Information department at CA Technologies. Overall she has 10 years of industry experience in the documentation space. Starting as a web developer, moving on to handle web content development, CBT content and finally worked over 5 years handling technical documentation of software products. Currently as a Manager at CA Technologies she manages a writing team of 13.

Malarvizhi 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 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 an e-mentor.

Sudha Nagarajan

Sudha Nagarajan is a senior manager at Brocade Communications, leading a team of engineers on the Data Centre Ethernet products.She has a B.E in Electronics from B.M.S.C.E , Bangalore and M.S in Computer Science from Stanford University, CA. With 15 yrs of industry experience working in US and India – Cisco Systems, SAP Labs and Brocade Communications, she has been involved in various engineering functions including Customer Engineering, end-to-end Testing and Automation infrastructure development, including 7 years of management experience. Sudha is also a core member in starting up WIN – Women in Networking, Bangalore Chapter for Brocade.

Khushboo Taneja

Khushboo Taneja is a computer science engineer and an MBA from the Indian School of Business (ISB) Hyderabad. She has over 10 years of extensive experience in the technology industry, spanning companies like GE John F Welch Technology Center, Infosys and Microsoft. Currently a Senior Program Manager for Bing, she’s been leading product development and launches for the past seven years at Microsoft’s India Development Center. A regular speaker at Microsoft’s technical conferences (TechEds), Khushboo specializes in internet based products and services and is very passionate about this growing space.

Moderator: Shubha Prithviraj, HP
Presenters: Payal Keswarpu and Pallavi Vajinepalli, Phillips

Abstract:
If there is any field where research and innovation have made the greatest impact, it is healthcare in terms of lives saved. Bench to bedside is tedious, time consuming and requires enormous patience with technical, regulatory and validation hurdles. However, it can be very rewarding. This session will focus on various healthcare needs and relevant technologies to cater to these needs. The requirements from technology perspective are very different for different geographies. In developed countries decision support systems could be a requirement based on reducing medical errors where as in low resource settings it is needed to provide a tool for the less skilled worker enabling maximal care.

CDS systems are an emerging field in healthcare research which is designed to link health observations with health knowledge to influence health choices by clinicians for improved health care. CDS systems encompass coordinated efforts of medical professional, computer scientists, software engineers and statisticians. In an age of cloud computing, mobile phones and wireless networks the dependence on clinical decision support systems is ever increasing. If not already, the likelihood of obtaining accurate deterministic advice from these systems is becoming critical especially in countries like India where the doctor to patient ratio is as low as 1:10,000.

This talk will further present a CDS system for screening/diagnosis of cervical cancer through development of an image analysis algorithm that automatically identifies the abnormal/affected zone in the cervix collected from a sequence of cervical images and provides objective assessment of the severity of the cancer.

Bios:

Shubha Prithviraj

Shubha is a Senior Manager at HP IPG R &D. She handles the delivery of FW solutions for Designjet Printers. Being in the IT industry over 15 years, she has handled development teams in various domains such as Automotive, Security systems, and Digital TV. She has worked with various international teams from US, Germany, Netherlands, and Spain. Before joining HP, she had a long stint with Robert Bosch, India and Philips. She holds a bachelors degree in Engineering from Bangalore University.

Payal Keswarpu

Dr. Payal is a medical professional and is currently working as a Principal Scientist in the Corporate Research division of Philips, Bangalore, where she plays a significant role in Healthcare Innovation for the emerging markets. She is responsible for innovations relevant for oncology care in India. Her academic qualifications include a M.D. and DNB in Pathology from St. John’s National Institute of Health Sciences, Bangalore. She has been a University gold medalist at both undergraduate and the post graduate level. She has fourteen publications in reputed medical and technical conferences and journals and seven patent applications to her credit.

Pallavi Vajinepalli

Pallavi Vajinepalli is currently a Senior Scientist at Philips Research Asia – Bangalore. She holds a doctoral degree from Computer Science and Engineering Department, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Her role at Philips Research involves innovating and developing new technology/ research for healthcare applications. Though her research experience is in diverse areas like signal processing medical informatics, tele medicine but it has the common theme of pattern recognition to develop maternal/women and fetal health and thus improve their quality of life and survival. She has six patent filings and seventeen research papers in national/international conferences and journals to her credit.

Moderator: Prabha Bhaktharam, AMD

Presenters: Jayashree A B, IBM (Speaker Cancelled); Aparajita Bhattacharya, ARM India; Kenneth Pichamuthu, IBM (New Speaker) and Bharathi V, Intel

Abstract:
There was a time when test issues were easily left as an afterthought to design. But increasing complexity in the design and manufacturability of both chips and embedded devices as well as the need to get first-time right silicon and beat the competition to market has brought testing and Verification issues to the forefront of the development process and closely link it with the design cycle.

The panel will take you through a verification strategy of a microprocessor Core, Chip, touch upon ASIC Verification flows, the verification lifecycle and various activities carried out during each phase. Moreover, in this globally linked age, where teams are widely scattered across geographies, verification is carried out 24*7 – So what are the trends that are emerging today and what are some of the unique challenges the verification community faces……

Most designers in the EDA and semiconductor world automatically substitute the word “verification” for testing. But what is verification and what activities are included in verification? What are Pre-silicon, ASIC and Post silicon Verification? What are Core, Chip , SOC verification? What is Design for Testability or DFT? To ensure first time right silicon and ideally no design-respin what would be the Verification strategy? What is the verification environment for all levels of verification for maximum coverage ? What would be the comprehensive test plans for module level and chip level to achieve zero bugs? What are the different Verification methodologies – like Coverage driven verification, Assertion based verification, etc. What are the current Industry standard Verification tools being used?

Bios:

Prabha Bhaktharam

Prabha Bhaktharam is a senior Design engineer working at AMD , Bangalore. She has about 6 years of experience in the Chip Design/ Verification domain. With a MS in solid State electronics from Arizona State University, US, she has worked both in US and in India, in companies like Philips Semiconductors, US and ARM India. After taking a long break of almost 5 .5 years after her kids were born she is back to working in the Industry. Prabha likes to sing – mostly Carnatic classical music, and read books.

Jayashree A B (Speaker Cancelled)

Jayashri A B acquired her MS in Microelectronics from Bits Pilani, Rajasthan India in the year 2005. She graduated with a B.E from Mysore University in the year 1996. She has been working with IBM India Systems and Technology group from 2000. Prior to this she was working for HoneyWell Library Development Group for 2 years. She is now the Advisory R & D Engineer for System ASICs Development Group in IBM India and her key area is Functional verification for ASIC chips. She has 6 issued US patents and has multiple publications published in various conferences.

Aparajita Bhattacharya

Aparajita Bhattacharya is a Technical Lead working for ARM Embedded Technologies Pvt. Ltd. in the area of Functional Verification of microprocessors. She has worked in functional verification for the past 11 years; 7 years in the US at IBM and ARM and 4 years at ARM India. Her experience ranges from verification of high end server cores to power efficient mobile microprocessors. Holds an M.S. in Computer Engineering from the Ohio State University and an MBA in General Management from the University of Texas at Austin. When not at work, she is at play with her 2 active little boys.

Kenneth Pichamuthu

Kenneth Pichamuthu has been working with IBM Microelectronics for the past 11.5 years. He spent 3 years at IBM Burlington working on Delay Test methodology and at IBM India working on Test insertion on IBM ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits). His focus areas include Logic Built In Self Test and Test Coverage improvement. He has 4 patents and a handful of conference submissions in this field.In his spare time, he likes running, solving crosswords and spending time at home with two naughty kids and a lovely wife.

Bharathi V
Bharathi is an Engineering Manager at Intel Technology India Pvt Ltd. She has about 13 years of experience in VLSI design of which 10+ years is in front-end Design Automation, RTL and Verification. Has done her Bachelors in Electronics and Communication Eng from Bangalore University. She worked for Texas Instruments for about 7.5 years in the field of front-end design automation. At Intel she leads the SoC Design Automation team which spans from setting up a project environment to project tape-in. She has many papers to her credit both internal and external and has also presented at DAC in 2010.

An Investigation of Photonic Crystal Based Bio Sensor

Presenters: Kavita Mulge and Preeta Sharan, The Oxford College of Engineering

Abstract:
An Investigation of Photonic Crystal Based Bio Sensor/Regarding Photonic Crystal Querries.

Bios:
Kavita Mulge
Mrs. Kavita is currently working as a Design Engineer, in Infotech. She has done M.Tech project from IISc, from Dept. of Phototonics center on BioSensor and received First class distinction in M.Tech. She is planning to take this work in future also like fabrication. Now we have work on the system level design work by using MATLAB and MATHEMATICA software and some scientific computing for designing the biosensor.

Preeta Sharan

Dr. Preeta Sharan, Currently working as an Prof. & HOD, Dept. of Electronics and Communication, The Oxford College of Engg. , Bangalore, Dr. Sharan has vast experience in teaching and research field of 12 years. Her Ph.D is from Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu Univ., and Post Doctorate from IIT Kharagpur. She has published various papers in international and national journals and conferences. currently working on a project on optical sensor under Naval research Board, DRDO. Dr. Sharan has published in textbooks and done textbook review on many books on electromagnetic engineering. Presently guiding 3 Ph. D student under her in optical sensor and on optical networking and has guided many M.Tech projects and B.Tech Projects.

AND

Computer Vision: Challenges in Object Recognition

Presenter: Vrinda Vasishth, Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, New Delhi

Abstract:
Computer Vision is a very interesting and challenging field of research in computer science, which has shown a great deal of development in the recent years. This presentation discusses the cutting edge research and techniques developed across leading universities, to give machines the kind of vision and sight we are blessed with. It would especially focus upon the challenges in object recognition technologies developed and their future. It would try to discuss the challenges of this field of research and the immense potential it has to push the limits of artificial intelligence and robotics.

Bio:

Vrinda Vasishth

Vrinda Vasishth is a Senior year undergraduate in Computer Engineering at Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, Delhi University, New Delhi. She has undergraduate research experience in the field of computer vision and is interested in its applications to robotics. After graduation she wants to pursue a PhD in this field. Recently, she got an exciting opportunity to participate in a very interesting Object Recognition related research at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.

Presenters: Davis Chiramal, NetApp; Uma Prabhala, Microsoft; Sugandha Srikanteswaran, IBM and Cheryl Willis, NetApp

Abstract:
It is a general feeling that you need to have positional authority to exercise influence, and there is a counter view that the ability to influence grants authority.

This session aims at tackling this challenge & help program managers bring value. This session aims to focus more on the Skills aspect of program management and less on the craft of program management – it will be handled by eminent personalities from the technology industry who will leverage their experiences to guide the participants on best practices, why certain things did not work and what pitfalls need to avoided.

Questions and Topics for Panel Discussion:

Empowerment & Authority 1. Empowerment of Program managers – How does the management/business owner view the role of the program manager? 2. How to assume authority when not explicitly stated….and when? Is it

Program management Essentials 3. What does a program manager need to exercise his influence?

Bios:

Davis Chiramal
Davis Chiramal is the Director for Strategy, Planning and Programs at NetApp Bangalore. He provides strategic inputs for the growth of Bangalore facility as a prime product innovation center developing capabilities across the value chain. Prior to NetApp, Mr. Davis lead the core operating systems group at HP ISO, and was responsible for development and support of a major part of HP- Unix.

Mr. Davis is veteran of Indian Air Force, where he had extensive experience in Radar, Electronic Warfare, System-Simulation and Database development.

He holds a Masters degree in computer science from IIT-K and Masters Degree in management from IIM-C

Uma Prabhala

Uma Prabhala is a Principal Program Manager on the Dynamics CRM team at Microsoft India (R&D) Pvt Ltd. Her current role includes defining and designing the next generation Customer Care CRM products. Prior to Microsoft, Uma was the Director of Product Management at Oracle, leading their Enterprise Applications Technology products group. She has donned a variety of technical and management roles in global organizations like American Airlines, Booz Allen, Siebel and Oracle. She holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University and a B. Tech in Electrical engineering from Osmania University.

Sugandha Srikanteswaran

Sugandha Srikanteswaran, a Program Director with AIM ,IBM India Software Labs, leads the WebSphere Adapter development for IBM World Wide and WebSphere Services Registry and Repository (WSRR) in ISL. With over 15 years of software Business Integration experience, she is known to deliver responsibilities with customer focus and high quality levels. Sugandha has great passion for IBM as a workplace and takes pride in giving back to the organization by advocating for “Change for betterment at Workplace”, growing the IBM (managerial and technical) community through appropriate mentoring and coaching, leading by example and fueling the ‘drive to achieve’ within fellow IBMers.

Cheryl Willis

Cheryl Willis Director, NetApp, an innovative storage and data management solutions company. She currently leads the Global Support organization in India. During her career, which includes 10-years at Ernst & Young, Cheryl has focused on IT Service Management and led teams that are comprised of people from different geographies and cultures, including Europe, Africa, Asia and North America. These roles have required working with stakeholders and various support groups where influencing skills have played a key part in success.

Presenter: Shalini Kapoor, IBM

Abstract:
Take a look at any informal business lunch. You will find the man at the table bragging about his feats to colleagues and you would notice the woman nodding her head and showing her bewilderment.

“Self Talk”, “Networking with intent”, ” Politically wise”, these are terms which most women shy from. Women break their backs so that someone, someday will notice their hardwork and treat then as Joan of Arks.

In technical careers, learning how to brag your achievements, leveraging your network and building your profile over the years becomes increasingly important for success. Learning to understand the thin line between being selfish and being fair to oneself is important and this comes with experience.

The speaker would share her own experiences of writing bragelogues, positioning herself to the people who matter, learning to talk about oneself in 2 sentences and branding on social sites.

Bio:

Shalini Kapoor

Shalini Kapoor, Chief Architect- Industry Solutions at IBM Software Labs is leading the Mobile Industry Solutions and Growth market solutions. She is leading research incubation projects in the areas of Mobile Security & data protection, Mobility testing and Mobile Payments/money. She has also led research efforts in innovating solutions specifically for emerging markets and Bottom of the Pyramid people. Shalini has been the Lead Integration architect for large and complex multi million dollar deals happening globally and has led design of cross brand SOA solutions for industries including FSS, Distribution and Public Sector both in global and domestic markets.

Moderator: Nivedita Aggarwal, CA Technologies

Panelists: Sajid Ahmed, Goldman Sachs; Anita Biddappa, IBM India; Kavitha Kadambi, OnMobile Global and Sudhanshu Pandit, Symantec

Abstract:
Competence transcends gender but some research results have revealed that there is an overall prejudice against women leaders. Women in leadership positions are more likely to have their competence questioned than men in leadership positions. Does that change the way women managers work with their employees? In this panel discussion, we will try to understand if it’s the management style or is it the influence of employees’ perception of women in leadership roles that makes female managers less preferable over male managers.

Bios:

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.

Sajid Ahmed

With over 17 years of experience, Sajid joined Goldman Sachs in 2006 as Vice President for Technology Infrastructure. He currently manages the operations and engineering functions at the Bangalore office which include Core Product Platform Management, Technical Service Analytics, Services Engineering, Production Control, Network \ Voice \ Multimedia Engineering, Database Engineering, Middleware and Virtualization. He co-heads the global Technical Services Operations which manages the firm’s production environment on a 24×7 basis. Sajid also co-heads the religion and culture diversity pillar under the India GLD program, co-heads the Campus recruitment in Technology, and represents TI in the Technology Career Development Council and Technology Sponsor for New Associate Program Analyst – India.

Anita Biddappa

Anita Biddappa, Program Director with IBM India, leads the Silicon Solutions Engineering team, which is part of worldwide Systems & Technology Division of IBM. She has over 20 years of Semiconductor & VLSI development experience (13 years in USA), and is known for her focus on high quality, efficiency & Client engagements. She has also held senior management roles at Intel (~ 4 years) and Lattice Semiconductor USA (13+ years). Anita’s passion for excellence & pride of ownership in hardware Chip delivery has helped ignite the growth of hardware development out of IBM, India in the past 3 years.

Kavitha Kadambi

Kavitha is Director IS & Special Projects with OnMobile Global (the leading Mobile Value Added Services company in India), leads the Information Systems & Security team at OnMobile. Prior to this, she led the Data Products Unit in India. She began her career as a Software Engineer at Infosys, and has about 16 years’ experience in various roles including Systems Engineering, Program Management and Knowledge Management. She has led large global teams and is interested in process definition and setup of technology at inception stages of programs through steady state. She has a BE from Bangalore University, and a Masters in Telecommunications Engg from Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago.

Sudhanshu Pandit

Sudhanshu Pandit is the HR Director at Symantec India and brings over 14 years of diverse experience in the technology industry. He has been with Symantec for over five years and currently heads the HR function for Symantec in India. Previously, Sudhanshu led talent acquisition for Symantec in the country. His work experience spans key HR functions such as talent planning, acquisition, talent development and delivery of HR services. Sudhanshu recently was presented with the “Young HR professional of the year” award as well as the “Indira Super Achievers Award”.

Moderator: Jyoti Ahjua, Yahoo!

Panelists: Laxmi Char, Yahoo!, Arundhuti Gupta, Mentortogether and Viswanath (Vishwa) Somasekhar, HP

Abstract:
According to study by Oracle development network, protégés in corporate mentorship programs advance as much as ten times faster than the average promotion rate, and mentors gain perspective in their own careers by grooming promising protégés. Networking is vital for one’s personal and career growth. Many people think of networking as circulating around a room and exchanging business cards. However, networking creates a pool of contacts from which you can draw leads, referrals, ideas and information for you job search and career progress.

Bios:

Jyoti Ahjua

Jyoti did her Masters in Computer Science from University of Connecticut. She joined Yahoo! bangalore in 2006 and has worked on various projects in Yahoo! web search engineering team. In past, she has worked on information retrieval methods for mobile pages and on developing a real time stream processing platform. Currently she is an engineering manager for a team that works on content optimization and relevance engine for various Yahoo! properties. Prior to Yahoo!, she worked in a mobile applications company, Dataviz in Connecticut.

Laxmi Char

With over 20 years of work experience, Laxmi describes herself as a “Customer Experience Evangelist” – something she believes is a market differentiator for any organization. Laxmi started her career in the Middle East in the highly competitive luxury goods retail market and moved back to India in the early 90s. Since then, she has worked across Marketing, Sales Operations and Customer Service teams in various industries, including Express Distribution, Cellular Telephony, Direct Marketing and ITES. Apart from her day job, Laxmi is a single mom and says this has helped her with multi tasking and time management issues. She is passionate about grooming the next generation of leaders – and supports coaching and mentorship programs at Yahoo! and with NGOs.

Arundhuti Gupta

Arundhuti has a Masters degree in Finance from the Manchester Business School, UK, where she studied as a Commonwealth Scholar, 2008-2009. Arundhuti has been documenting Mentortogether’s work as a researcher with the Center for Public Policy, Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore since July 2010. Her voluntary work includes being a founding team member of the Resurgent India Trust in 2006, a Bangalore-based non-profit organisation focusing on programs that ‘unleash the potential of youth’.

Viswanath (Vishwa) Somasekhar
Viswanath Somasekhar has nearly 20 years of experience in the IT industry:both in services and in product development. He is heading the Large format printers (LFP) engineering section. Working on the AEC segment, Latex Signage and photo segments. Earlier he worked on the Digital Projectors, Digital Television, high resolution display systems. Prior to joining HP, Vishwa was with Mphasis-BFL, where he worked on various technologies ranging from Virtual Reality, POS security systems, Voice writer products and many more. A very passionate person, having had wide exposure in different technologies, Vishwa has been a great mentor for many successful engineers.

Moderator: Charu Srinivasan, Microsoft

Panelists: Vinatha M. Chaturvedi, IBM India and Mrittika Ganguli, Intel

Abstract:
This panel is aimed at discussing the architectural and design considerations when designing cloud compute platforms at cloud scale for real-time workloads. The goal is for the audience to appreciate the complexity and scale considerations when designing at peta-byte scale. To illustrate these design complexities, the panel will describe the usage of the Apache Hadoop platform, Google’s Bigtable distributed storage system and explain how an application can be designed to utilize the elasticity of SQL Azure to enable for highly cost effective, on-demand, and virtually limitless scalability. The panel also addresses the challenges around fine-tuning these massively distributed systems.

Bios:

Charu Srinivasan

Charu Srinivasan is Principal Development Manager in virtualization team at Microsoft. She focuses on developing and articulating a long-term technical vision, creating and reviewing designs and exploring new technology directions. In her career span of 20 years, she has built sophisticated distributed systems. She worked on multi-master replication technologies for Microsoft Access and Merge Replication in SQL Server. Subsequently she became Principal Architect, SQL Server Replication. In 2005, Charu was Principal Architect for Microsoft Data Protection Manager. In 2009 she joined the core OS group to work on Hyper-V. She holds numerous patents in these areas.

Vinatha M. Chaturvedi

Vinatha spent 17+ years in the U.S including setup the centers for i2 and Hitachi Consulting in India. As i2’s Chief Architect she designed Collaboration Planner. She joined IBM India SWG in 2006. In 2008 as Sr.Mgr in STG’s cloud computing team designed out various cloud aspects. In 2009 setup the GTS Cloud CoE team and designed the first SO production cloud pilot. Vinatha is a member of IBM IWLC, has 4 patents with i2 and 3 pending patents with IBM. Vinatha has an MBA from SMU, Dallas, Texas.

Mrittika Ganguli

Mrittika Ganguli has 16+years of experience in SW development in development, management and architect roles. Her technical strengths and contributions are in Server HW management, System SW and energy management Software. She has co-authored a patent, technical white papers and conference papers and initiated and implemented Agile development processes in her team. Her team is participating in path-finding discussions with IT, planners, architects, sales and researchers on various cloud experiments and POCs to design the next generation HW and SW specifications. Her previous experience included working in Hughes, UTRC and other startup and service companies in India and United States.

Moderator: Radhika Bollineni, CA Technologies

Panelists: Hemalatha Bhaskar, IBM and Venkat Koneti, CA Technologies

Abstract:
Modeling the software architectures of large systems is a challenging task. Large software systems contain a system of systems that is composed of millions of elements interacting in tandem, to objectively achieve the overall functionality. The interaction of these elements can more often be far from obvious, and need a number of assisting factors to design and develop. A wide variety of abstractions are required by developers to assist them in describing and analyzing such architectures, including information about the components and relationships that comprise a system, the static and dynamic structure of the system, and the behavioural responsibilities of components in the system. In addition, good tool support is needed to provide modeling, analysis, design and code generation, and reverse engineering facilities. This session throws insight into several architectural modeling approaches, view points and tooling that can support achieving the end objective of a robust system. We bring to you our experiences and best practices from IBM and CA technologies and believe these thought processes will better assist you in making informed decisions on your projects and system design.

Bios:

Radhika Bollineni

Radhika Bollineni is a Manger at CA Technologies(India), leads the teams in Virtualization & Automation segment. With more than 11 years of experience in the IT industry, including 5+ years in various management roles held various responsibilities in terms of People, Project, and operations management. Led the global teams and is interested in process definition and setup of technology at inception stages of programs through steady state. She was a key contributor in rolling up the CMMI process standards across the organization. Radhika is also an active participant in Women Leaders in CA ITC forum. She holds Master’s Degree in Computer Science from Nagarjuna University.

Hemalatha Bhaskar

Hemalatha Bhaskar is an Application Architect and IBM Certified SOA Solution Designer. She has over 14 years of experience in the design and development of enterprise wide solutions. Hema served as Development Manager and Architect for the IBM’s Application on- Demand– Technology Resource Management (TRM) solution. She was responsible for the conceptualization and design of the virtualization framework with in the Technology Resource Management (TRM) platform. Hema is part of the core IBM’s Cloud Special Interest Group and has led several Cloud Computing studies. Hema is core member at the IBM India Technical Experts Council (TEC) and leads the Women In Technology (WIT) B’lore.

Venkat Koneti

Venkat Koneti with more than 17 years of total experience in varied technologies and platforms, and more than 7 years at CA is a seasoned professional having worked for the Office of the CTO, supporting the Corporate Reference Architecture, tasked with the creation of Reference Architectures of CA Products. He is the first member from India elected to the Council for Technical Excellence – an Elite Community providing thought leadership and technology leadership to CA, its customers and IT industry. He established and leads the Archiecture@CA community spanning all the groups in CA. He is also a member of Technical Innovation Committee.

Moderator: Mitun Bhattacharyya, IITB

Panelists: Alka Agrawal, PESIT, Bangalore; Latha Parameswaran, Amrita University; Rebecca Parsons, Thoughtworks and Uma Rani, SAP

Abstract:

To identify the challenges in the present education system in India from both an industry and an academic point of view. Different views from academics, industry and will be given, focusing on steps that can be collaboratively taken to improve the situation.

1) From your experiences what implementation plans would you draw up to improve the situation? Could you please give 1 methodology each in Bachelors, Masters and PhD levels. 2) Standardization is primarily done to ensure that students get the basic information in the presence of under qualified teachers. How do we go about improving the teachers quality phase wise, as a sudden change is not practical? Please give one methodology that you think should be done. 3) How might we quantify the benefits of improvements to better justify expenditures on these solutions? 4) How internet and multimedia (youtube, Khan’s acamedy, free online courses like MIT ocw and tutorials) can be used by Tier-2 & tier-3 colleges? 5) How does someone passionate about making a change, but not a person in a position to make financial decision, go about convincing their management? 6) How do we make sure that throughout the process women interests are taken care of?

Similar questions will be posed to our panel members, 2 from academia and 2 from industry, and their inputs will be taken. Suggestions from attendees will also be recorded and incorporated in handout.

Bios:

Mitun Bhattacharyya
Over 8 years of research experience. Worked for a year as Assistant Professor before joining IITB on Post Doctoral Fellowship. Involved in several cross disciplinary projects applying computer science to areas such as Infrastructure monitoring and control, Oil Production Platform, Smart Energy Grid and Health Care. Additionally taught and guided projects for undergraduate and graduate students respectively, both in the US and India. Volunteered as an adult education tutor and taught adult students from both Mexico and US.

Alka Agrawal
Alka Agrawal brings a rich & diverse near 20 years of global IT industry experience. In her career across 5 continents with TCS, HP & Novell, she was a part of the Indian IT industry in making. She holds MTech Computer Science degree from IIT, New Delhi & has patents in the area of TCP/IP communication. Her last role was VP Engineering, Novell Inc. & heading the Indian Development centre with 400 engineers. Currently Alka is teaching Computer Networking & Information security as a guest faculty. Her passion also takes her to work with an NGO in the area of Active citizenship & Civic awareness.

Latha Parameswaran
Dr. Latha Parameswaran – Worked in software industry for 10 years before joining academia. She has been in academia since 1999 and presently holds the position of Professor and Vice Chair person for Computer Science department at Amrita University, Coimbatore. Her interests are Information Security, Image Processing, Multimedia Computing and Multimedia Data Mining. She has a Ph.D in Computer Science, in the field of Content Based Watermarking for Image Authentication. She has published several International conference and journal papers. Her present responsibilities include, handling classes for B.Tech, MCA and M.Tech (Computer Vision and Image Processing) students, guiding M.Tech scholars and B.Tech students in their projects and guiding Ph.D students in the area of Image Processing and Image Security. Her special interests include encouraging more and more women in to work in Engineering, Technology and Computing. In line with her interests she recently conducted a conference for Women in Computing, namely “Amrita ACM-W Celebration of Women in Computing” in September 2010 at Amrita University.

Rebecca Parsons

She has over 20 years’ application development experience across industries. Rebecca has published in language and artificial intelligence publications, served on program committees, and reviews for several journals. Before coming to ThoughtWorks she worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida where she taught courses in compilers, program optimization, distributed computation, programming languages, theory of computation, machine learning and computational biology. Rebecca received a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Economics from Bradley University, a Masters of Science in Computer Science from Rice University and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University.

Uma Rani
“Short in frame but tall in deeds” is an apt description of Uma Rani. A good strategist with the right mix of traditional and innovative approach with strong emphasis on fundamentals, Uma is a shrewd manager, who is always up-to-date on the current affairs and happenings in the Industry. Uma has enormous IT experience spanning close to 20 years. She has been associated with SAP for over 15 years. Currently, Vice President, IMS Applications India, Dallas & Palo Alto, Uma employs “Management by Empowerment” strategy where she gives enough freedom to each direct report to perform at his or her best.

Moderator: Anupma Sharma, Microsoft

Panelists: Asha Potla, CA Technologies; Namita Mishra, CA Technologies; Stuti Shukla, Microsoft and Khusboo Taneja, Microsoft

Abstract:
Many software engineers are at a decided disadvantage in creating successful products because they don’t understand many basic and important concepts in product management. This Panel discussion outlines many crucial concepts and processes in product management, including the challenging role of the product manager. Any person interested in knowing how the business aspect of a product development drives organization’s success and all those who aspire to become product managers will highly benefit from this Panel discussion.

Bios:

Anupma Sharma
Anupma Sharma has an overall experience of 10 years in Indian IT industry across reputed product companies such as Nortel networks, Conexant Systems, NXP Semiconductors and Microsoft. Her area of expertise include Networking technologies and system-on-chip architecture. Her passion for technology combined with a keen product level perspective has enabled her to successfully juggle orthogonal profiles like that of a Software Architect and Program Manager with equal aplomb. She has received several service excellence awards over the years. She has completed her bachelor and masters degree in computer science from Delhi University.

Asha Potla
Asha Potla is a Senior Product Manager at CA Technologies for Service Assurance products. Asha holds a post graduate program in management from Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad and is a Novartis scholarship holder. She also holds a dual degree with Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering and Masters in Information Systems from BITS, Pilani (Campus), Rajasthan Asha is an active panel member of GSVC business plan competition held every year at ISB, Hyderabad and is also part of ISB admissions team.

Namita Mishra
Namita has experience in cutting edge technologies like CA (Niku) Clarity , in IT Consulting, Designing and Training for reputed vendors like CA. As a Clarity Consultant, delivered Clarity Technical Boot Camp Trainings for Computer Associates accross the globe, in London, Slough(UK), Sydney, Chicago, Atlanta, Johannesburg, Beijing, and Singapore. Trained 1500+ learners with audience profiles as diverse as Senior Management, Operations staff and Implementers. She has experiences with varied Clients such as Vodafone, Symbian, Standard Chartered Bank, HSBC Bank, Telstra, Accenture, Wipro, NIIT, VIrtusa, Rolta and many more, that has given a solid understanding and thorough knowledge of consulting and training delivery aspects with diversified exposure to multiple technologies as Clarity, Mercury, C++, MS Office and Open Workbench.

Stuti Shukla
Stuti Shukla is a results oriented business leader. She has been leading Marketing, Product Management and Business Strategy for 17 years targeting global, US and India markets. A seasoned Microsoft veteran with eleven years with the company, Stuti has held a variety of leadership roles at Microsoft in the US and India, including running worldwide marketing for small Independent Software Vendors (ISV), leading global business strategy for the multi-billion dollar Windows Server Business, to leading Product Management and Marketing for the Mobile Platform group most recently. Prior to Microsoft, Stuti worked with Reliance Industries in India, leading due diligence for new investments for the company.

Khusboo Taneja
Khushboo Taneja is a computer science engineer and an MBA from the Indian School of Business (ISB) Hyderabad. She has over 10 years of extensive experience in the technology industry, spanning companies like GE John F Welch Technology Center, Infosys and Microsoft. Currently a Senior Program Manager for Bing, she’s been leading product development and launches for the past seven years at Microsoft’s India Development Center. A regular speaker at Microsoft’s technical conferences (TechEds), Khushboo specializes in internet based products and services and is very passionate about this growing space.

Presenters: Anshu Kak, IBM India

Abstract:
Fellow or Distinguished Engineer are the highest roles to be achieved in a Technical Career Path. They are appointed by the company for extraordinary accomplishments, and are considered to have the potential to make continued contributions.However there are very few who achieve this in there technical career and the numbers can just be counted for Women Fellows and DEs in the IT industry.

What does it take to achieve this? Are there any dos and don’t on the path to achieve this.

The Speaker would share their views on the same.

Bios:

Anshu Kak

Anshu Kak is a Distinguished Engineer IBM Software Group. At present she is the IBM World Wide CTO SWG Client Technical Professionals Cloud and Smarter Computing working out of IBM US New York. Anshu is a tenacious advocate of technical vitality both inside and outside of IBM. She has twice received the Women In Color Technology “All Star Award” from a national level US publication magazine. She has authored books like, “Guidance to Successful Software Deployment”, ” Value Realization from Efficient Software Deployment” and written numerous papers. She is a member of Open Group, ACM and Women in Technology consortiums.

Moderator: Manjula Gondi, CA Technologies

Panelists: Kiranmai Dutt Pendyala, AMD; Renu Rajani, IBM India; Vidya Sridharan, Intuit and Rama Velpuri, CA Technologies

Abstract:
This session is meant to establish that growth in the organization isn’t only about gaining the depth of experience in one domain, but also about building the breadth of skill and expertise in different functions and verticals in the industry. The discussion will draw on the success stories and experiences of those who have made it to the top and point out that career progression is not always about moving up in one career track, but also about making lateral moves while moving forward. We would also talk about the risk involved and highlight the benefits of such a move in the longer run.

Bios:

Manjula Gondi

Manjula is development manager at CA technologies where she is responsible for the development of a SaaS enabled PPM product at CA Technologies. She has over 14 years of experience in the IT industry in domains like e-commerce, telecommunications, supply chain logistics and online banking. She worked as an independent consultant for several years in the US before moving back to India. She was an active member of the Toastmasters club in the US. She enjoys outdoor activities and traveling with her family and has visited 16 countries so far. She has two children and lives in Hyderabad with her family.

Kiranmai Dutt Pendyala

Dr. Kiranmai Dutt Pendyala is currently the Head of Human Resources, AMD India. She brings together a unique blend of keen academic focus and organizational experience. She has successfully straddled diverse roles in teaching, training, human resource development, consulting, quality, and technical writing. She is an accomplished author with multiple of her books prescribed as curriculum by various universities across the country. She is also an international examiner on Business Communication for University of Cambridge, UK. She has 21 years of experience across IT industry and academia.

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 over 22 years of industry experience.

She has been with IBM for over 5 Years and moved to Global Technology Services group from Global Business Servicess (GBS) in mid-2010. Her leadership roles at GBS included Large Account/Delivery Exec, and Test Services Leader and Turn-around Leader for a high visibility Crit-Sit Account. Renu also leads ‚Taarein‘, a program to develop senior women leadership pipeline.

Vidya Sridharan

Vidya Sridharan is 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.

Rama Velpuri

Rama Velpuri is VP of Software Engineering at CA Technologies. Earlier, Rama Velpuri was the CTO of Kenexa Technologies, played an important role in taking Kenexa public (KNXA) on NASDAQ in June of 2005. Before that, Velpuri was the founder and CEO of Oramasters Inc. where he successfully built Oracle database monitoring products that proactively monitored and managed customer’s databases online, for high availability. He has started his career 22 years back with Oracle and worked his way up to be an Executive Director. During his tenure at Oracle, Velpuri authored nine successful technology books.

Coordinators/Moderators: Chavvi Agarwal, IBM; Divya Jain, TCS; Rashida Travadi Jayashree, IBM; Vijayalakshmi Krishnamurthy, IBM (speaker cancelled) and Rajalakshmi Srinivasaraghavan, IBM

Abstract:

Birds of feather – Technical Contest – Are You the Queen of Geekdom?

Do you think you are a technical and programming queen? If yes, then here is a chance to testify your technical skills and grab exciting rewards.

1) Crack the Crossword! – A simple crossword with questions from basics of computing and technology.
2) Are you ready for the code-athon? – A program / algorithm needs to be developed by the participants for the given problem. Remember, the way you take is as important as reaching your destination.
3) Puzzle-o-mania – Here is the fun part. Participants have to solve interesting puzzles and anagrams. Get to know all you can! This one’s for you, if you are a “Puzzle maniac”.

Take the contest and increase your chances to win big. Be a part of it! Win exciting prizes!

Bios:

Chavvi Agarwal

Chhavi Agarwal is working with IBM since 4 years. She has total 7yrs of experience.
she is working as a team lead for Platform Agent team in IBM Systems Director.Leading the “IBM Technology Web Contest” across ISL as a part of UR activity.

Divya Jain

Divya Jain is a post graduate in Computer Science from SASTRA University, Tanjore, currently working at Tata Consultancy Services Ltd as Assistant Systems Engineer. She has been a scholarship attendee of the GHC, India in the year 2010, and is now a part of the planning committee for GHC India. She is an ardent reader and has worked on papers that have been published in journals like IEEE.

Rashida Travadi Jayashree

Vijayalakshmi Krishnamurthy (Speaker Cancelled)

Vijayalakshmi Krishnamurthy has 7 years of total industry experience and working in IBM for the past 5 years.
Currently she is part of STG AIX System Test team.

Rajalakshmi Srinivasaraghavan

Rajalakshmi Srinivasaraghavan is a developer on the IBM AIX team. She has worked on support and development projects on AIX in areas like TCP/IP, Security,Commands and more for the past 5 years. She holds a BE degree in Computer Science and Engineering.She plays a key role in various diversity initiatives.

Moderator: Chitra Sood, Microsoft India Development Center

Panelists: Mala Balakrishnan, IBM and Neha Garg, NetApp

Abstract:
The workforce today is seeing demographical and societal changes and a unique situation where multiple generations are part of the workforce. Today’s entrants into the workforce are highly talented and motivated with immense confidence about their abilities. The transition into the workforce from college is challenging because they have to deal with managers who belong to different generations & whose style of work is very different.The differences are not stark or obvious–they are subtle and while both the manager and the team seem to think they know the issue their approaches causes frustration and friction.This interactive sessions aims to help the new entrants into the workforce understand the points of convergence and divergence and see how they can achieve a middle ground.

Bios:

Chitra Sood

Chitra Sood has over 20 years of experience in Indian and transnational organizations in HR and Finance of which nearly 15 years was spent in specialist HR roles. She is currently the Business Manager in the Windows Group. A strong advocate of creating an environment that recognizes and values diversity in the work place she believes that managing teams is going to get increasingly complex because a generational shift is happening resulting in a fundamental mismatch in expectations between managers and employees. Leveraging the differences is going to be key for organizations to succeed in the long term.

Mala Balakrishnan

Mala Balakrishnan is General Manager in IBM. Mala has 16 years of work experience in the IT industry of which 7 years has been with IBM. Prior to this she was with Wipro where she joined as a campus recruit. She has wide experience from Project, Program Management to Global Project Delivery and Management of large technical teams across functions and geographies. She is passionate about diversity and inclusive leadership. With extensive experience in leading and mentoring a teams she can contribute views and ideas that would help employees across generations to work complementing each other.

Neha Garg

Neha Garg is a Computer Science graduate from BITS Pilani. She joined Netapp after graduating in 2009 and has since been working as a developer.She deals with file systems serving huge amount of data and is currently working on IPV6. She feels that in this modern internet-driven society,technology plays a humongous role in everybody’s life and software engineers can play their part by building strong software infrastructure.She is passionate about quality code, good books,food, and community service. She is a core member of Netapp CSR wing and runs a workshop called “Women on web” promoting computer literacy amongst Indian housewives.

Presenter: Sangeeta Bhattacharya, Intel

Abstract:
The industry has been witnessing an increasing trend of multi and many core processors. What is the reason behind this trend and where is it headed? Accompanied with this trend is an emerging shift to parallel programming. What are the challenges of parallel programming and what kind of application design changes does it involve? Is this shift really necessary? Which application areas are most impacted by this shift? This session strives to answer these questions and inform the audience about the research being conducted in this space, which spans High Performance Computing, Parallel Computing, Throughput Computing and Supercomputing.

Bio:

Sangeeta Bhattacharya

Dr. Sangeeta Bhattacharya is a research scientist in the Parallel Computing Lab (PCL) at Intel Labs, India. She is currently working on various workload optimizations on modern multi/many-core platforms. Sangeeta joined Intel Labs after receiving a PhD in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis in August 2008. Her research interests include ubiquitous computing, wireless sensor networks, data mining and parallel computing. In the past, she has worked on ubiquitous healthcare platforms and application QoS provisioning in dedicated and shared wireless sensor networks. Sangeeta has been associated with several top-tier conferences as a publisher, reviewer and technical program committee member.

Moderator: Swarnalatha Karatlapally, CA Technologies

Panelists: Charumathy Srinivasan, Microsoft India; Muthulaxmi Srinivasan, IBM Systems and Technology Group and Girija Venkataramani, Independent Practitioner

Abstract:
Patenting is a way to protect ones intellectual property. An Industrial R&D professional as an individual or as team make inventions without even aware that it can be protected by law by patenting. Patents add value to both the company and the inventor. The goal of this session is to educate the audience on identifying innovative ideas, introduce them to the patenting process and create awareness on patenting. Audience will gain knowledge on what is invention in the meaning of the law, what is the legal process behind patenting right from the legal expert and the first hand patent owners.

Bios:

Swarnalatha Karatlapally

Swarna is a Senior Quality Assurance Engineer at CA Technologies, Hyderabad. She has over 7 years of experience in software testing. She has worked in different domains spanning from Life Sciences, Health Care, Financial, Home Lending and Security. Prior to CA she worked for TCS and Applabs. She holds her MCA from KITS College. She participates in various diversity initiatives at CA and is part of Employee Champion Program.

Charumathy Srinivasan

Charumathy Srinivasan is Principal Development Manager in virtualization team at Microsoft. She focuses on developing and articulating a long-term technical vision, creating and reviewing designs and exploring new technology directions. In her career span of 20 years, she has built sophisticated distributed systems. She worked on multi-master replication technologies for Microsoft Access and Merge Replication in SQL Server. Subsequently she became Principal Architect, SQL Server Replication. In 2005, Charu was Principal Architect for Microsoft Data Protection Manager. In 2009 she joined the core OS group to work on Hyper-V. She holds numerous patents in these areas.

Muthulaxmi Srinivasan
Muthulaxmi Srinivasan is a Senior Software Engineer in the z storage firmware development team in the IBM Systems and Technology group. She has in depth knowledge in z storage firmware, Unix kernel and library development and AIX linkers and loaders. Muthu has 14 years of Industry experience. Muthu worked at Synergy Infotech Private Limited where she worked on developing simulators, boot loaders, assemblers and linkers for Atmel Finland DSP chips. Muthu is an active mentor and provides technical help to various projects. She has 2 Issued patents and around 5 more in the applied state.

Girija Venkataramani

Girija Venkataramani is a Patent Agent registered with Indian Patent Office and works for the IP outsourcing firm TMPsearchers. Her expertise includes Prior Art Search, Invalidity Search, Freedom to Operate Search, Patent Drafting, Patent Filing, Preparation of Office Action Responses, Claim Mapping, Preparation of Accelerated Examination Support Document and Drafting Responses for official examination report of trade marks. Her IP services also extend to Plant Variety Protection and Farmers Rights. Girija earned her BSc and MSc in Agriculture from Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, India. She has earned certificates on completion of advanced courses on IPR laws offered by WIPO.

Moderator: Lakshmi Santhanam, Intel

Panelists: Neeharika Adabala, CybULab Pvt. Ltd; Shivkumar Kalyanaraman, IBM; Sudeshna Sarkar, IIT Kharagpur and Ritu Soni, Guru Nanek Girls College

Abstract:
The talent pool in academia and industry remains mutually exclusive owing to various reasons like misalignment in schedule, funding, research goals, legal issues. A researcher is faced with several challenges in driving collaboration in terms of legal issues in Intellectual property ownership, patents, staged funding and resource management. The extent of collaboration should be at the right level for a successful end product – with industry folks and students and professors equally contributing to the research work.

The panelist will share their rich experience in driving successful collaboration between industry and academia with case studies and highlight how collaboration helped them in shaping their career as researcher. They will also exchange views on applied and theoretical research and how the confluence of the two will impact art of research. The panelist will identify the shortcoming in the existing environment; provide ideas and recommendations to other academicians and industrial researchers.

Bios:

Lakshmi Santhanam

Lakshmi Santhanam is a senior software engineer at Intel India (since 2008) and is working on multimedia security and session management protocols. She obtained her B.E in Computer Science from University of Madras. She further obtained her MS/PhD degree from Univ of Cincinnati, OH, USA in 2008 from the Dept of Computer Science. Her research interest include artificial intelligence based intrusion detection, selfishness in mesh network, designing tools for detection of network attacks like DoS, blackhole. She has worked as an Intern at Qualcomm, R&D, San Diego on improving TCP performance at handoff in Ultra Mobile Broadband networks.

Neeharika Adabala

Neeharika Adabala is the founder and chief architect of CybULab Pvt. Ltd. a company that works on applying information visualization techniques and cognition theory to develop educational services. She has worked as a researcher in the Vision, Graphics and Visualization Group of Microsoft Research India. She has worked in Philips Research India, MIRALab – University of Geneva, and University of Central Florida. She is on the editorial board of the Springer journal for computer graphics “The Visual Computer”, and serves on the program committees of international conferences. She has a MS from IIT Madras and a PhD from the IISC Bangalore

Shivkumar Kalyanaraman

Shivkumar Kalyanaraman is a Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) & Senior Manager of the Next Gen Systems & Smarter Planet Solutions Department at IBM India Research Labs, Bangalore. He was a Professor at the Department of Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, specializing in networking and wireless communications. He received a B.Tech degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India in July 1993, followed by M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at the Ohio State University in 1994 and 1997 respectively. He also holds an Executive M.B.A. degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2005).

Sudeshna Sarkar

Sudeshna Sarkar is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Kharagpur. She did her B.Tech. from IIT Kharagpur, MS from University of California, Berkeley, and PhD from IIT Kharagpur. She had earlier taught at IIT Guwahati anbd IIT Kanpur. She has been actively working in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. She has been involved with several large scale projects on Natural language Processing, Information Retrieval, Recommender Systems and Data Mining, sponsored by both government and industry.

Ritu Soni
Ritu Soni is the Head of Computer Science Department in GURU NANAK GIRLS COLLEGE, YUMUNA NAGAR, Haryana. She holds a Ph.D (Computers) in Haryana College. She has published 35 research papers at international / national conferences & guided 33 M.phil students. She has guided 7 research scholars. Her areas of interest are S/W process engineering, Web Engineering, E-Learning, Could Computing, and Human Reliability. She has patented Nine E-content modules on “Introduction in C++ Programming Language” and Eight Video programs on “Computers & Multimedia” are under development. She has written 3 books, gave many extension lectures in different institutions and helped people make interactive audio/video lectures.

Moderator: Uma Prabhala, Microsoft

Panelists: Rini Ganguly, Goldman Sachs; Seema Maithel, Microsoft and Lata Uttham, Dell

Abstract:
“Should I hang on or take a flight from my job” has been playing in your mind far too often lately. It takes courage and immense thinking to quit especially when you aren’t even sure what you really want. Most of us have been there. The signs maybe pointing to you having to quit your job but you just aren’t sure. What are some of the criteria you should put on your list when you are considering to change your company or role? This session would immensely help to learn what factors to consider when hanging on to your current job or role , from the experiences of our extremely respected panel of women who have carved their paths by making tough decisions , taken risks and have excelled in their chosen paths.

Bios:

Uma Prabhala

Uma Prabhala is a Principal Program Manager on the Dynamics CRM team at Microsoft India (R&D) Pvt Ltd. Her current role includes defining and designing the next generation Customer Care CRM products. Prior to Microsoft, Uma was the Director of Product Management at Oracle, leading their Enterprise Applications Technology products group. She has donned a variety of technical and management roles in global organizations like American Airlines, Booz Allen, Siebel and Oracle. She holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University and a B. Tech in Electrical engineering from Osmania University.

Rini Ganguly

Rini Ganguly leads the CRM function within Securities Technology at Goldman Sachs. A very strong proponent of diversity in workplace, Rini co-heads the “Reach Out” pillar in the Women India Network.Rini has a total exp of 12 years.She joined the firm in Bangalore in 2008 and was made Vice President the same year. Prior to joining GS, Rini worked at Fidelity Investments in Client Implementations as Program Manager in India .Prior to that Rini worked with HCL Technologies and spent 5 years in strategic marketing role.Rini has a Bachelors degree in Chemical Engineering and a Masters in Business Administration.

Seema Maithel

Seema Maithel is Principal Test Manager of Office Mobile team at Microsoft, Hyderabad. She manages the test team responsible for shipping all of Office Applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote etc) on Windows Mobile Phone. She has worked for Microsoft for last 14+ years on variety of products like Office PowerPoint, Hotmail, and multiple applications in MSN like Calendar, Contacts, Invites, Gallery, and Web Messenger. She had worked at Apple for 2 years before joining Microsoft. She moved to US in 1988 after finishing her MS and getting married and spent initial years there raising her kids before joining Apple.

Lata Uttham
Latha Uttam has a qualification is B.E., (Electronics and communication engineering) and carries a 13+ year’s industry experience .She is presently working as a senior technologist in the Validation team of Dell product group. Her career spans across Hardware, System engineering, Program management and System testing. She has been a consistent top performer & comes with a solid background of Server/Storage/Systems domain & has good experience of with global teams (US, Taiwan & China).

Moderator: Sreelatha R, IBM

Panelists: Abhinav Agarwal, Oracle; Mythreyee Ganapathy, Microsoft; Ashok Kallarakkal, IBM; Rahul D. Sadafule, NXP Software and Subramanya Sharma, ClearTrip

Abstract:
Product Management is a growing profession in India. Several Global IT organizations have setup Product Management functions here. India as an emerging geography is becoming more and more attractive for these businesses in terms of market, as well as talent required to perform the Product Management function. For eg: Large R&D setups for MNCs in India is paving way for creating roles such as Technical Product Manager, as closeness to engineering teams is important for Product Development & Release activities. In this BOF session, we will have open interactive discussion among practicing leaders of Product Management, how they made the transition, what are the dos and don’ts, what has worked and what keeps them going?

Bios:

Abhinav Agarwal
Abhinav Agarwal is Director of Product Management & Strategy at Oracle, and is responsible for the Oracle BI Mobile product, and also for advanced data visualizations and geo-spatial analytics in the Oracle BI EE suite. He was the first product manager hired at Oracle’s IDC, and has over 17 years of international work experience at products, services, and startup companies. He is a gold medalist from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, and holds a BE (Hons) degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Mumbai (Bombay).

Sreelatha R
Sreelatha has 13+ years of Product Development experience in software industry and performed several senior management roles in Engineering and Product Management at IBM. She has managed large corss-functional product Development teams and delivered multiple programs and product releases. She is currently working as Senior Product Manager for IBM Integration portfolio with a focus to define and prioritize product requirements & strategy to address local market. Sreelatha holds a BE degree in Electronics and Communication from National Institute of Technology, Karnataka and Post Graduation in Management from Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.

Mythreyee Ganapathy
Mythreyee Ganapathy has 14 years of experience working in various computing careers. She started her career as a systems integration consultant doing software development for PriceWaterhouseCoopers. At Microsoft, she started building new products in the integrated developer environment space. She helped to start and build the Microsoft Research lab in Bangalore. For the last 3 years, after moving into program management, she has been working on online search and advertising in multiple projects. Mythreyee is a computer engineering graduate from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani and a Master in Computer Information Systems from Bentley College, Waltham, MA, USA.

Ashok Kallarakkal
Ashok is Senior Product Manager in IBM. He has many years of Experience in Product Management, Pre-Sales and Implementation of a high end ERP product built for the US Market. He has managed several project teams and handled the delivery function and operations of MNC organizations.

Rahul D. Sadafule
Rahul is seasoned professional in the mobile industry with rich experience in full product life cycle including conceptualizing, architecting, developing, suppliers (make/buy decisions), project management, technical marketing till commercial deployment. He has rich experience in complex embedded products targeted for Consumer Electronics Devices such as mobile, TV, portable media players. He is an expert in Indian mobile market i.e. key players, technology, platforms, features & products. He has nearly 14 years of experience working in India and abroad as a part of international, multi-cultural teams.

Subramanya Sharma
Subramanya Sharma is Senior Vice President, Product at Cleartrip.com. He is a specialist in Business Management, Product Management, Product Marketing, Internet, Telecommunications, Mobile Marketing. He enjoys challenges in the Internet & Mobile space (especially in India). Anything new & revolutionary excites him!!

Presenters: Apala Lahiri Chavan and Ananya Roy, Human Factors International

Abstract:
This presentation will narrate the history of women in computing in India right till the present day, in the form of interviews with women across 3 generations, from various cities in India and abroad. This will be presented as a film. We feel that this narrative that spans across 3 generations of women will go a long way to inform and inspire the audience about the achievements of women like them in the field of computing. In addition, the narrative may also provide ideas to the community of women in computing about areas where more could be done by collective focus.

Bios:

Apala Lahiri Chavan

Apala was responsible for starting up Human Factors International’s User Experience consulting operations across Asia ( Mumbai, Bangalore, Pondicherry, Shanghai and Singapore) since joining HFI in 2000 as MD – India and VP – Asia. Apala is an award winning designer ( International Audi Design Award) and specialises in the area of Cross Cultural Innovation and Design. Apala has taken on a new role recently in HFI as Chief Oracle and Innovator. Recently, her focus has been on the emerging markets. She has written a book on this subject, Innovative Solutions: What Designers Need to Know For Today’s Emerging Markets.

Ananya Roy

With a background in Communication Design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, Ananya started her professional career as a documentary film maker. She has traveled extensively across India, scripting, directing, shooting and editing environmental and developmental videos.

She was soon drawn to the world of usability, and has been a User Experience Researcher and Designer with Human Factors International for close to 6 years. She has worked on a range of projects, conducting usability tests and reviews, designing information structures and experimenting with new and offbeat research methods. She has worked with companies like Yahoo!, Citibank, Vodafone, Samsung, Nokia.