I was born and raised in Chromepet, a suburb in Chennai, India. I did my schooling at Vivekananda Vidyalaya, Chromepet. In 1996, I started my B.Sc (Hons) in Mathematics at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Sri Satya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, Whitefield (near Bangalore) and graduated with my Masters in 2001. I worked with Satyam Infoway for a short while, before joining Photon Infotech. At Photon, I worked on a variety of things, including Flash scripting, 4th Dimension data base, MS SQL and .net among other things and met a bunch of guys from whom I realized, sleep was optional and coding was mandatory.

I gave my GRE in October 2001, decided to join the CS department at UGA for my masters in CS, boarded a flight and after a really long flight and some interesting experiences, reached Athens, GA. I lived right next to the Sanford Stadium and got hooked on to Football as much as CS. I joined the LSDIS Lab in 04, went to Watson for internships in 04 and 06 and had a lot of fun living in Athens. Given the freedom to chase all my desires at work, I picked up Web programming, SOA research, XML amongst a bunch of other things. I worked on the METEOR-S project for two years, published a few papers, traveled to Ireland, London, Amsterdam, Berlin and Finland and learnt how to appreciate a good beer and how to drink a good whiskey.

In January 07, I moved to Dayton, got myself a few layers of thick outerwear, and made friends for life (Cartic, Meena, Topher and AJ). I went to India in Summer 07 for my internship at IBM India Research Labs, came back to the cold and friends. I also published a few more papers and now am working on my dissertation.

In my spare time, I play the violin, hack around some general Web stuff and write code that someday I might use somewhere (or not). I am addicted to Wikipedia and have managed to acquire useless bits of trivia about a lot of things. I listen to Indian classical music (Ganesh Kumaresh, Kanyakumari, L. Subramaniam, Lalgudi Jayaraman) and Ilayaraja and A.R.Rahman. I love watching movies (Stanley Kubrick, Sidney Lumet, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Alejandro Iñárritu, endless) and TV (Seinfeld, South Park, NCIS, Bones, Simpsons, The Office, 30 Rock, Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, end less list) and Football (Georgia Bulldogs, New England Patriots). I volunteered for the Obama Campaign during the 08 elections.