Narayanan Shivakumar ("Shiva")

Bio for Narayanan Shivakumar ("Shiva")

Shiva is a Google Distinguished Entrepreneur and the founding Director of the Google Seattle-Kirkland R&D center. Currently, he is excited about a variety of webcrawling and search technologies. Earlier, he was the Engineering Director that led AdSense (and related products) through beta, launch and incredible growth till Google's IPO. His first role at Google was leading Google Search Appliances through beta, launch and many revisions of hardware and software. Before Google, he cofounded Gigabeat, an online music technology startup, funded by Kleiner Perkins and angels (Andy Bechtelsheim, Sabeer Bhatia, Rajeev Motwani and Ram Shriram) and later acquired by Napster. At Napster, he built a media identification system to address court imposed compliance requirements. He spent summers at Microsoft Corp, Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, between 1993-1997.

Shiva graduated with a BS'94 (Summa Cum Laude) from UCLA in Computer Science, MS'97 from Stanford and PhD'99 in Computer Science from Stanford. For his PhD, he worked on Detecting Digital Copyright Violations on the Web with Prof. Hector Garcia-Molina. His thesis was awarded the annual Arthur Samuel Dissertation Award by the Stanford Computer Science Department in 1999. His "fun" two minutes of fame came through SCAM (Stanford Copy Analysis Mechanism), an experimental system he built that helped identify widespread academic plagiarism in 1995 ( Communications of the ACM Editorial). At UCLA, he was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Award in 1993, and the IBM Outstanding UnderGraduate Award in Computer Science in 1994.