About Me...

I was born and brought up in Ahmedabad, a lovely (but hot) city in Western India. After finishing schooling in Ahmedabad, I joined the Bachelors program in Computer Science at Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), unarguably one of the best engineering colleges in India. This was in 1996. Four years later, I moved to France to work with INSEAD, the European School of Business Administration.

I lived in Fontainebleau, a small town 55 kms. south of Paris. Just for the record, Fontainebleau was Napoleon's summer residence. His palace (the French call it a 'chateau') at Fontainebleau has close to 3000 rooms (someone clearly missed the point then). Anyways...Fontainebleau is located at the edge of Europe's largest forest. If you happen to visit the place in Spring, the hiking trails in the forest would be great fun. And if you are as lazy as me, you can drive through the forest :)

In the meanwhile, I was accepted in the Masters program in Computer Science at Stanford University. The admit came through at a time when I had settled down comfortably in France and was working on a startup with a friend from undergrad and a couple of guys from France and UK. I took some time deciding between the two options but in the end, the Stanford value proposition seemed to be better ;) B-speak.

I joined Stanford in Fall 2000 and at the time of writing this, I am 2 quarters from graduation. Grad-life is so much different from what I recollect from undergrad days. But hey, its all good.

Most of my work (academic and otherwise) is focussed on Computer Networks. If I were to make a list of favourites, it would read: High speed networks, distributed systems, media networks and delivery systems, storage area networks, large-scale Internet architectures, real-time systems, mobile and appliance computing. You can take a look at the different projects I have done till date here, here, here and here.

Update #1, Nov 2001

The 'About Me' sections tend to go out of sync pretty soon. Making a website is a big pain in the first place and then talk about maintaining it!! Anyways, I have been getting good feedback on the quality of the webpages so I guess its worth the effort. Besides, if I were not updating this page, I would be spending the time playing Quake III or Unreal Tournament anyways.

I used to be a Quake III guy...until I got a new video card and downloaded the Unreal Tournament demo. The visual effects are an order of magnitude better. I am truly impressed. However, when it comes to weapon selection, Unreal needs to catch up. Unreal weapons are indeed unreal. Or maybe that was the point...in which case, I missed it :)

I am taking a break from networking this quarter. Took up computer graphics (enjoying every moment of it) and biomedical informatics. Check out the paint program (not the usual dumb paint) and a polygon scan converter+animator I implemented for graphics. Currently, I am working on a video game. I am working with Sujith and Sriram to make the next-generation video game in 4 weeks (!) In Sujith's words: "Its not a video game. Its an 'experience'". Amen! ...and stay tuned. If the game does not turn out that well, it will still be an 'experience' - a bad one at that ;)

Update #2, Jan 2002

So the video game turned out to be a hit! We finally named it Pulse and you can check out the details here. We were the finalists of the CS248 video game competition - won a few goodies from EA games :)

This is my last quarter at Stanford and I am looking for a job now. Yeah, times are tough but things seem to be getting brighter by the day. The tech sector may see Spring soon. More after I graduate...