People

Making India's Traditional Knowledge Accessible and Intelligible

Trustees

Dr. P Ramanujan

He has served as the ex-Associate Director (IHLC), at Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). He was also the Group Coordinator of Indian Heritage Group (IHG) at the Centre , engaged in activities related to Sanskrit and Vedic Processing in Computers.

He has proficiency in the Gurukula system, Taittireeya Krishna YajurVeda, Vyakarana, Vishishtadvaita Vedanta and the Nalayira Divya Prabandhams (4000 devotional songs) of Alwars in Tamil. He has been awarded various titles, including “VEDA VARIDHI, “VEDA VIJNANA SIROMANI”, “VAIDIKA BHUSHANAM”. He has also been appointed as “ASTHANA VIDVAN”, by Sri Ahobila Mutt in 1999.

He was awarded the “SAMSKRITA MITRA” Puraskar by MHRD in August 2003 in recognition of remarkable services rendered for the cause of Sanskrit through Information Technology.

Dr. K. Gopinath

He has served as a Professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore in the Computer Science and Automation Department. His education has been at IITM (BTech), UWisconsin (MS) and Stanford Univ (PhD).

Besides technical interests in Computer Science (here), he is interested in computational aspects of the Indic tradition.

He has organized a conference on the computational aspects of Indic Science and Technology at IISc (2017) supported by the Indian Council on Philosophical Research.

He is a regular and incisive contributor to various Indic themed conferences.

Dr. Sai Ramakrishna Susarla 

He currently serves as the Dean of the School of Vedic Sciences at MIT ADT (Pune). Has a 20-year long career in systems software research and development with multinational corporations. Most recently, he was a technical director at NetApp in Bengaluru. He has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA, and M.Tech in computer science from IIT Kanpur. He has close to 20 research publications and 30 patents in the areas of large-scale software architecture, data management and analytics. He

He has a deep passion for and long association with the Samskrit language, Indian spirituality and music. He has been a long-time tech volunteer for Samskrita Bharati, a social organization dedicated to spread Samskrit literacy as a mass movement. His area of focus is making India’s native knowledge more accessible and understandable to the younger generation. He believes technology has a big role to play in bridging the gap between traditional and modern education in India. There is untapped potential for innovation in this space. But this requires training people to bring modern technology and Vedic studies together.


Advisors

Madhusudan Therani

He is a seasoned tech entrepreneur, a former academic, and has been building software and hardware for the past couple of decades. His leadership roles in tech companies and startups is well known.

He has a proven track record of working on large scale data analysis, machine learning, text analysis, and decision-making models in a variety of domains including engineering design, product lifecycle management, online search,  computational advertising and digital humanities. He is an alumnus of Carnegie-Mellon. He also actively pursues work on developing tools for building Indic Knowledge Systems including digitizing Sanskrit texts and to enable data driven research on issues in the Academic delivery of Science and Humanities.

He is an active partner in the development of the Vedavaapi platform that can support a wide-variety of use-cases in the effort to capture, digitize , knowledge engineer and disseminate traditional Indian knowledge.

Sathya Atreyam

An independent market analyst, Sathya works on custom research  projects in the greenfield areas of The Edge, 5G, Industrial IoT, in addition to the traditional 4G/LTE areas. He has 25+ years of diverse experience in the Telecom Media and Technology (TMT) industry , has hands on experience spanning the lifecycle of a Telecom Network including product development, network planning and operations, solution architecture, pre and post sales, product marketing.

At Vedavaapi, he is actively involved in unearthing “existing yet hidden intersections” of Indic knowledge systems such a Aesthetics, Yoga Sutras, Paninian Grammar, Ayurveda, Tarka et al with contemporary technologies such as AI, Robotics, Emotional Intelligence, Cognitive Sciences, Linguistics, NLP and others.

Sudarshan T N

He is a Computer Scientist by profession, engages in the fields of AI and related technologies. A published scholar in various fields , Indology , Vedic Sciences , Population Genetics , Technology.

Having built and consulted with 10+ technology startups, in different verticals, he is of the firm belief that the systems and infrastructure that Vedavaapi is building is a crucial missing piece in bringing Vedic knowledge in a modern dharmic context. He opines that if Dharma has to flower globally , knowledge systems aligned to and emanating from Dharma have to be embraced. The repository of knowledge that can be put to human good is immense and is just waiting for the right enabling platform. Vedavaapi is a possible first step in addressing the asymmetry in the narratives of modernity