My Science School

Satyanarayan Gangaram Pitroda or Sam Pitroda is one name without which the history of Indian IT and telecom sector remains incomplete. For his efforts in taking the country to the global map, Pitroda was rightly named the father of India’s communication revolution.

           Sam Pitroda was born on May 4th, 1942 at Titlagarh, Odisha. After completing master’s degree in physics and electronics from Maharaja Sayajirao University in Vadodara, Pitroda moved to the US and obtained masters in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago.

           For the next two decades, Pitroda was fully involved in technology research. In 1974, he started a digital switching company called Wescom Switching. Thereafter, he made several inventions and won patents. In 1975, he invented the electronic diary, and became a pioneer of handheld computing. In 1983 he designed Compu-cards, a computer-themed card game. The following year Pitroda returned to India, and founded the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT).

           Pitroda is also credited to have democratized the telecom industry in India, by introducing public call offices (PCO) throughout the country, thereby making calls accessible and affordable to all. Till date, Pitroda has won more than 100 patents in his name. 

          Ajay Bhatt is a computer architect best known for developing the USB (Universal Serial Bus), the cable used to connect different devices. He also invented the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) and the PCI Express. Altogether, this Indian- American owns more than 130 patents.

          Bhatt was born in 1957 in India, and lived here till his completion of graduation at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. He then moved to the US and obtained a masters from the City University of New York. In 1990, he joined Intel as a senior staff architect after which he designed the devices and technologies. He was part of the chipset architecture team in Folsom, California.

          For his contributions, Bhatt has won several awards including the Achievement in Excellence Award in 2002 for the PCI Express specification development. In 2013, he received the Outstanding Achievement in Science & Technology Award at The Asian Awards in London. The same year he won the Europe an Inventor Award too, in the Non-European countries category. The award is institute by the European Patent Office.

 

           Vinod Khosla is an Indian American venture capitalist best known for co-founding Sun Microsystems. It was a company that sold computers its components, software and IT services, headquartered in Silicon Valley. Khosla was the CEO and chairman of the company in the early 1980s.

           Born on 28th January 1955 in Delhi, Khosla was inspired to make a career in technology after reading an article about the founding of Intel. To chase his dreams, Khosla studied electrical engineering at IIT Delhi, and masters in biomedical engineering at the Carnegie Mellon University. He also did an MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

           In 1980, Khosla co-founded Daisy System, an electronic design automation company. Two years later, he joined hands with his classmates Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy to set up Sun Microsystems. For two years, he served the company as its chairman and later quit to become a venture capitalist.

             Pranav Mistry is an Indian computer scientist known for many interesting innovations, including the Sixth Sense and the Samsung Galaxy Gear smart watch. At the age of just 35, this young man is the head of the Think Tank Team and the Director of Research at Samsung.

             Known to have developed in less than five months, Sixth Sense made Mistry a celebrity in the field of IT. The device is like a pendant which people can wear, but is a combination of a mini projector, camera, sensors and computing device. It helps users to use their fingers to interact with different objects around them. Mistry’s other inventions include the Mouseless, an invisible mouse with an infrared camera and laser; Sparsh, a way to transfer data between devices easily by simple touch gestures, and Blinkbot, a system which use users’ blink to control a robot. Yet another, Quickies are smart sticky notes that can send reminders and messages to users.

             For his works, Mistry was made the Young Global Leader, 2013 by the World Economic Forum. In May 2011 he was listed as one of the 15 Asian scientists to Watch by the Asian Scientist Magazine.

             Pranav Mistry was born on 14th May 1981 in Palanpur, Gujarat. After schooling he pursued bachelor’s degree in computer science. The bright boy then moved to the US, and obtained a master’s degree in media arts and sciences from MIT and later, a PhD at the MIT media lab. Mistry also holds a master of design degree from the Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay.

            After his studies, Mistry worked in various companies, including the Microsoft, Google, and NASA.

           In 2012, he joined Samsung as the director of research. Currently, he is the global vice president of the company. 

Vinod Dham is an Indian - American inventor and entrepreneur, popularly known as the father of Pentium chip.

          Born in Pune, Dham did his BE degree in electrical engineering at the Delhi College of Engineering, and a masters at the University of Cincinnati.

          In 1971, he joined a Delhi-based semiconductor company called Continental Devices as an engineer. Then he moved to National Cash Register (NCR) in Ohio. After a brief stint there, Dham joined Intel, and developed the famous Pentium processor. It was a huge success in the market, and took Dham to the position of the vice president of the Intel’s Microprocessor Products Group. He also co-founded Intel’s first Flash Memory technology (ETOX).

          He worked there till 1995, and then moved to NexGen, a startup, as its COO and executive vice president. The company was later acquired by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), where Dham developed the K6 processor, which even briefly held the title of fastest computer processor.

          In the years that followed, Dham founded many ventures. He is currently the managing director of the Indo-US Venture Partners, as well as the CEO of Acadglid. In 2000, he was appointed to the President’s advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders by the then US President Bill Clinton. 

          Satya Nadella, is the current chief executive officer of the tech giant Microsoft. Nadella was born in India on 19th August, 1967 in Hyderabad. He stood out as an innovative boy since childhood. From an early age itself, Nadella knew that he wanted to pursue studies in computer science. Later, he graduated in electrical engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology. He completed his MS from the University of Wisconsin, USA.

          Nadella started his career at Sun Microsystems. After a brief stint in the company, he joined Microsoft. Microsoft offered him a wide variety of opportunities and challenges. He led many major projects, including cloud computing in Microsoft.

        

Continue reading "Why is Satya Nadella regarded as a technology legend?"

       Sunder Pichai, is a pioneer in the field of information technology. He is best known as the chief executive officer of Google. Inc. Before being the CEO of one of the giants in the IT world, Pichai worked in Google for various projects. He played a crucial role in the development of popular Google products like Google Drive, Chrome OS and Google Chrome. He went on to oversee the development of various apps like Gmail and Google Maps.

           Most of you are well aware of the operating system called Android. Sunder Pichai was the one who added Android to the list of Google products. Sunder Pichai was selected to become the next CEO of Google on 10th August 2015. He stepped into the new position on 2nd October 2015.

           Sunder Pichai was born in Madurai, Tamil Nadu. He was an engineering graduate from IIT Kharagpur. Later, he acquired a master’s degree from Stanford University, and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania. The life of Sunder Pichai is inspirational, and his CEO post in the tech giant Google brought him global recognition.

 

           Bill Gates was born on October 28th, 1955 in Seattle to William H. Gates, Sr., a prominent lawyer, and Mary Maxwell Gates.

           During his school days, Gates stood out as an ambitious and intelligent student. He wrote his first software program at the age of thirteen. It allowed users to play games against the computer.

           In 1973, Gates graduated from the Lakeside School, and won the National Merit Scholarship. He then enrolled at Harvard University. But by 1975, he dropped out of college, and started working with Paul Allen to form Microsoft. Thus, at the age of 20, he co-founded the world’s largest PC software company, and established himself as an entrepreneur.

 

Continue reading "Why is it said that the life of Bill Gates is an inspiring one? "

           William Henry Gates III may not sound familiar to us, but the name ‘Bill’ Gates certainly does. He is an American technology entrepreneur and investor, best known for establishing the Microsoft Corporation.

             He is one figure without whom the history of information technology stays incomplete. Along with Paul Allen, he founded the Microsoft Corporation in 1975, making it the world’s largest PC software company. With this, he triggered the personal computer revolution, and brought people closer to technology through user-friendly software and programs.

              Gates had been a student at the Harvard University when the project turned successful. Subsequently, he dropped out of academics, and focused on the microcomputer industry. He was the chairman, chief executive officer, and the chief software architect of the firm.

                 By 1987, Bill Gates became one of the richest persons in the world, and has been on the list ever since. Currently, he is the richest man in the world: with an estimated net worth of US dollars 84 billion.

                 In February 2014, Gates stepped down as the chairman of Microsoft, and has been actively participating in philanthropic activities.

 

Soviet-born American computer scientist and entrepreneur Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin is one of the two founders of Google.

He was born on August 21st, 1973 in Moscow to Michael Brin, a mathematician, and Eugenia Brin, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre. The family migrated to the US when Sergey Brin was six.

The brilliant student that he was, Brin studied mathematics and computer science after high school. He graduated from the University of Maryland. It was during his PhD studies that he met Larry Page, a fellow researcher, with whom Brin worked to create Google. Later, the Google subsidiaries too came up.

Brin, was awarded an honorary MBA from the IE Business School for his work, and is a recipient of the Marconi Foundation Prize.

His Internet entrepreneurship also helped Brin to enter the world’s billionaires list. As of November 2016, he was ranked 13 on the Forbes’ list of billionaires, having a net worth of 37.9 billion dollars.

Presently, he is the President of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google.

 

           The story behind the birth of the world’s biggest search engine is not a simple one. There was much hard work and effort behind it, revealed in the lives of its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It was initially conceived as a research project when the two were pursuing their PhD at Stanford University.

             As the name suggested, Google had to contain a vast amount of data that was to be explored by its users. The company Google Inc., had a very humble beginning, and was opened in a rented garage in Menlo Park, California.

              With an initial amount of around one million dollars, Page  and Brin set up the company at ‘Googleplex’ in California in 1998. However, their hard work did pay off, and by 2013, Google became the most sought after search engine, with an average of five million searches in a day.

               The company also expanded to create multiple projects including the Orkut, Google Maps, Google Reader, iGoogle, Google Earth, Google Apps etc. Popular mobile operating system Android was also developed by Google.

                   In August 2015, the announcement of a new parent company ‘Alphabet Inc’ was made, and subsequently, Page and Brin moved to work on the new venture. Following this, Indian American computer scientist Sundar Pichai was made the CEO of Google. 

Larry Page was born on March 26th, 1973 in Michigan to Gloria and Carl Page. His father was a professor in computer science at the Michigan State University, and his mother was an instructor in computer programming at Lyman Briggs College. Quite naturally, their son grew up with a special interest in computer technology in the midst of books and magazines on the subject.

Even during his schooldays, Page had been a gifted student who became the first one to turn in as assignment from a word processor.

After schooling, he attended the University of Michigan for BS in computer engineering, and later, also secured an MS In the same subject from Stanford University. At Stanford, Page met his fellow researcher Sergey Brin, with whom he built a search engine called Back Rub.

In 1998, the duo launched their major project ‘Google’. The years that followed witnessed Google branching out to form new projects, including the social networking site Orkut, Google Desktop Search, Google Maps etc.

           Not many wings of the Internet have been as influential as Google, the most successful search engine in the history of information technology. Its popularity is such that the very term ‘google’ has entered our common parlance.

          For any doubt regarding anything under and above the Sun, one seeks to ‘google’ it up. This is thanks to Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

            Lawrence Page or Larry Page, the American computer scientist, was a research student in Stanford University when he co-founded Google Inc. The search engine he developed, listed results on any query, according to the importance of the pages. Google was named after ‘googol’, a mathematical term.

             Since its introduction, Google has been the most popular search engine, receiving around five billion searches daily. Page, who was the CEO of the firm, was ranked 17 on the Forbes’ List of the Most Powerful People, in 2013.

              In August 2015, Page and Brin created ‘Alphabet’, a new parent company to oversee Google and its subsidiaries. Page is now the CEO of the new venture. Page is also the inventor of Page Rank, Google’s search ranking algorithm.

             As of November 2016, Larry Page is known to be the 12th richest person in the world. 

Sabeer Bhatia is an Indian- American engineer who co-founded the webmail company known as ‘Hotmail.com’, which once had more users than the Gmail.

Born in Chandigarh on December 30th, 1968, Bhatia completed his schooling in Bangalore, and graduation from BITS, Pilani. At Pilani, he qualified for a transfer scholarship, and moved to the California Institute of Technology. Later, he joined Stanford University to pursue an MS in Electrical Engineering. In 1994, Bhatia, along with his former colleague Jack Smith, started working on what later became a path-breaking innovation. They set up Hotmail on July 4th, 1996, and created history by attracting more than four million users within six months.

By 1998, Hotmail was so successful that Microsoft acquired the company. Bhatia worked for a small period with Microsoft then, before launching his next venture Arzoo Inc., for e-commerce.