Prof. Manish Parashar

Director of SCI and Presidential Professor, Kahlert School of Computing, University of Utah

Manish Parashar is Office Director of NSF’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, where he oversees investments in national cyberinfrastructure. He also co-chairs the National Science and Technology Council’s Subcommittee on the Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem and the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force. He is a Presidential Professor in the University of Utah’s School of Computing, Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute and a fellow of AAAS, ACM, and IEEE.

Dr. Rama Govindaraju

Senior Engineering Director, NVIDIA

Built and led the team defining the methodology to inform the architecture and design of ~10 generations of servers, 5 generations of TPUs (Tensor Processing Unit for AI/ML workloads), Video transcoding accelerators, storage systems, all deployed at scale in Google data centers. Responsible for the efficient operation of the fleet from an end to end perspective enabling the virtuous cycle of HW-SW co-design. Defined the strategic vision for many critical aspects adopted at Google. Led software architecture for 5 generations of Supercomputers at IBM.

Prof. Andrew Thangaraj

Chair at CODE and Professor at EE, IIT Madras

Andrew Thangaraj received his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, India in 1998 and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA in 2003. He was a post-doctoral researcher at the GTL-CNRS Telecom lab at Georgia Tech Lorraine, Metz, France from August 2003 to May 2004. From June 2004, he has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras, where he is currently a professor. From Jan 2012 to Jan 2018, he served as Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications. From July 2018 to July 2022, he served as an Associate Editor for Coding Techniques for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

Prof. Vijay Kovvali

Research Professor at CiSTUP, Indian Institute of Science (IISc)

Traffic Engineering, Traffic Signal Systems, Intelligent
Transportation Systems, Road Safety, BRT Planning & Operations

Raghu Dharmaraju

CEO, AI & Robotics Technology Park, I-Hub (ARTPARK), Indian Institute of Science (IISc)

With over two decades of experience, I have founded and scaled impactful innovations at the intersection of deep-tech, societal impact, and business, contributing to national-level policies. Achievements include winning Global Grand Challenges (Equitable AI) and Grand Challenge India (climate, maternal health), co-founding Wadhwani AI, TRACE-TB, and MIDAS (India’s AI dataset system). My work has delivered AI systems benefiting 80M+ people and med-tech innovations like Embrace warmers, saving ~1M babies. Partnering with IISc, ICMR, NITI Aayog, and Google, I’ve raised ~$20M for AI-driven social good, with expertise spanning digital health, agriculture, strategy, and innovation management. Education: IIT Madras (B.Tech), University of Massachusetts (M.S.), Cornell (M.B.A.).

Manoj Agarwal

Co-founder and CEO of Chief AI, Ex-Uber Senior Staff Engineer, Ex-Microsoft Principal Applied Scientist

I have over 20 yeas of experience in research.

Specialties: Thinker, partial philosopher, analyst.

Filed over 30 patents in USPTO, all of them granted. Received ACM India Doctoral Dissertation Award (Honorary Mention) and Best Paper Awards twice at prestigious international conferences.

My Erdős number is 3 (Manoj Agarwal – Krithi Ramamritham – O’NEIL, PATRICK EUGENE – Paul Erdős)

Tharun Kumar

Founder & CEO of ECOSTP – Sewage to Gold

Tharun has In-depth knowledge of Sewage Treatment Products and drives strategic vision. Proven in creating sustainability ‘businesses’ and ‘products’ from scratch hands-on, institutionalising processes and energising teams. Past leadership roles with Motorola, Hughes, Cable & Wireless and Sutherland. AMP from IIM -Bangalore and ISO50001 Energy Auditor.

Jaya Dhindaw

Executive Program Director, Sustainable Cities and Director, WRI India Ross Center

Jaya is an urban development professional and researcher with over two decades of global experience in sustainable development, urban resilience and natural resource management. She provides strategic leadership to all urban development, and planning and resilience initiatives across WRI India and is currently also the Executive Program Director, Sustainable Cities and Director, WRI India Ross Center.