Since April 2017, I have been the Founder of an initiative called urbansciencesIN, which is formally registered in Mumbai as Respirer Living Sciences Pvt. Ltd. The company is a recognized “startup” by Department of Industrial Policy & Promotions (DIPP) of Government of India [DIPP Certificate 5311]. The company, as part of its Realtime Air Quality Monitoring solutions, has developed the Atmos – Realtime Air Quality Monitors. I am also a Principal Consultant to a DST-Intel funded research program, administered by Indo-US Science & Technology Forum (IUSSTF), on Realtime Air Quality Monitoring called SATVAM (Streaming Analytics over Temporal Variables for Air quality Monitoring).

From March 2015 till December 2016, I was heading a sensor journalism (where IoT meets Data Journalism) project called #Breathe at IndiaSpend. We were building India’s first independent, real-time air quality monitoring network built on low-cost devices. The project was launched in December 2015. Data from this project has been analyzed by research groups like those at EPoD Hardvard/EPIC Chicago as well as by mainstream media groups like NDTV, LA Times, The National, Mashable, MINT and in prime time TV Debates, etc. The project has also partnered with Twitter to provide a true IoT based service for realtime air quality data where users can directly query for this data via Twitter. It received a honourable mention at the Data Journalism Awards 2016 in the Open Data category. It also won the mBillionth 2016 award for mobile innovation for the developmental technology sector in the environment category. An invited talk on this was also organized by Microsoft Research (MSR) India for their IoT Workshop held at IISc, Bangalore. More details are here.

Till August 2014, I was Principal Architect & Researcher at Mindtree Research Labs. I was leading the Internet of Things research program where we focused on IoT standards, protocols and Middleware technologies and solutions. I worked at Mindtree for four years in technology practices such as cloud computing and open source scalable computing.

Prior to Mindtree, I worked in the global services and engineering team at a California based Silicon Valley company for over four and half years. The company specialized in providing hosted (Software-as-a-Service) solutions for e-commerce security and multi-factor authentication using public-key cryptography technology. I worked on implementing the latest Internet architectures and technologies, and gained in-depth experience with concepts such as PKI, Payment Card Industry specifications (Chip/Pin, CAP/DPA, 3D Secure, Verified by Visa, MasterCard SecureCode, etc). During this time I also traveled onsite extensively and was involved with a number of client engagements and engineering solutions delivery for customers in the USA, UK and Switzerland.

I started my career, in September 2001, in the Lab of Prof. N. Balakrishnan at the Supercomputer Education & Research Center of Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore working on a government sponsored project for building a machine learning and anomaly based network intrusion detection and vulnerability assessment systems. Details of the work done and systems built can be read about over here.

Academic Experiences:

I have a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from NJIT, USA and a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Engineering from University of Mumbai, India. During my M.S. I had a graduate research fellowship (SBIR Phase II grant) for four semesters to work on complex network routing, protocol level technologies and anomaly detection in operating system executables. My M.S. Thesis was on the topic of Data Classification of Malicious Executable using a Machine Learning Technique. I was also a finalist in the Google Summer of Code 2005 competition.