SCS Distinguished Lecture: Bruce Nelson Memorial Lecture - Lalitesh Katragadda

— 6:00pm

Location:
In Person - Rashid Auditorium, Gates Hillman 4401

Speaker:
LALITESH KATRAGADDA , Founder and Chief Executive Officer, IndihoodCreator, Google Map MakerCo-founder, Google India

The Last Assignment

When i graduated from CMU, Raj asked us to go forth and build technology for the poor, illiterate, oppressed and differently abled. Red meanwhile had drilled into me “If you haven't done everything, you ain't done anything”.

It took me a while to get serious about these. Along the way, I learnt a couple of things that seem self-evident, but rarely acknowledged. Have we made any product that works for all 8 Billion of us? Maybe technology matters, far far more than even we technologists acknowledge. And all people are capable. Having no proof, nor theory, will share experiences.

In an inquiry led by building stuff, peppered predominantly with failed attempts, i stumbled on a few green shoots, only one became useful for more than a billion, another became vital for a couple of hundred million. The last few years has been an attempt to build technology that makes such platforms substantially easier for people to create.

This is likely to be my only lecture at CMU. It will be filled with technical snippets. It will be a simple message to the students who are of my kids' age. It will be a report to my gurus and teachers: That i am still at it. Though not successful. Not yet…

—

Lalitesh Katragadda is a pioneer in population scale platforms. His creation, Google Map Maker, tripled the world's digital maps, mapping 4 Billion people in 187 countries. The UN and aid agencies used these user generated maps in hundreds of disasters to assist, rescue millions.

Lalitesh co-founded Google's first international engineering center, retired as Google’s Head of India products having invented, led products including Crowdsourced YouTube Subtitles, Crowdsourced translation corpus, Indic handwriting & Google Transliteration.  He is now focused on creating technology that works for all 8 Billion of us, as founder Indihood, Swaja Labs, co-founder Avanti Finance. As advisor MEITY, DOT, NHA, DST, NPCI, NHAI, NSE SCOT, MoF, IIT-Bombay; Lalitesh has architected India’s Open API, AP Fiber Grid, Aarogya Setu, India’s public digital platform for Covid, used by 200 Million; co-designed eSign, GST, DigiLocker, UPI 3.0, GNSS Tolling.

Lalitesh has spoken at TED, the Brookings institute and the Whitehouse on how the internet will revolutionize the lives of the next 5 Billion.  Prior to Google, Lalitesh briefly served on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon where he founded the Lunar Rover Initiative and later founded Sphereo, a robotics startup which became Google’s first acquisition in 2002. Lalitesh received his PhD and MS from CMU in Robotics and Computer Science; MS from Design Division, Stanford; MS in Aerospace, Iowa State and his B-Tech from IIT-Bombay. 

For More Information:
scs-dls@cs.cmu.edu

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