Over 60 eager attendants were present at the USC Viterbi India Alumni Dinner held February 25, 2012, at the ITC Royal Gardenia in Bangalore, India. Among opportunities to network and reconnect, alumni in attendance, many now running companies or in senior technical or academic positions, were given an overview on current Viterbi happenings by Dean Yannis C. Yortsos.
Guests enjoy remarks at the annual USC Viterbi Alumni Dinner.
Introduced by Sudha Kumar, director of USC Viterbi’s India office and organizer of the event, Dean Yortsos was well-received receiving questions from the enthusiastic crowd and even requests for copies of his presentation slides. Audience members were particularly interested in Dean Yortsos' description of the convergence between engineering and the social sciences.
Kumar also introduced Dr. Ishwardutt Parulkar, Chief Technology Officer of Cisco System's Provider Access Business Unit, Cisco's first India-based operating business unit. During his remarks, Parulkar claimed that when he made his transition to India, he relied heavily on the USC alumni network in the Silicon Valley to recruit for Cisco in Bangalore. During dinner, Parulkar made several suggestions to take the network to greater heights in India, including developing a Distinguished Lecture Series featuring top researchers from USC.
Parulkar graduated from USC in 1998 with a PhD in Electrical Engineering and is currently a member of the Technical Advisory Board of the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering. Prior to Cisco, Parulkar had a long career in the Silicon Valley - first at Apple, and later Sun Microsystems, where he worked on several innovative technologies. A strong desire to bring innovation and product development to the Indian IT landscape brought Parulkar back to India in 2010. He relocated to spearhead the conception and development of an original, next-generation networking product to be fully developed in India for Cisco. His
development, a new 3G/4G router dubbed the ASR 901, recently won the New Technology Advancement Innovation Award for the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) at the NASSCOM India Leadership Forum 2012.
Additionally, USC currently boasts three alumni on the faculty of the renowned Indian Institute of Science (IISc): Dr. P. Vijay Kumar, who also joined the gathering, Professor and Chairman of the Electrical Communications Engineering Department at IISc Bangalore (who also holds an adjunct faculty position in USC’s Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering), Dr. Atul Chokshi and Dr. Praveen Kumar, who were unable to attend, both received their PhDs under Dr. Terence Langdon and currently serve on IISc’s faculty in the Materials Science Department.
Dean Yortsos connects with India-based USC Viterbi alumni.
Also in attendance were USC Viterbi Vice Dean Cauligi Raghavendra, Dr. Surya Prakash of the USC Loker Hydrocarbon Institute, USC India Office Director Kamal Chadha, and Dr. Ranjit Nair, President of the USC Alumni Club of Mumbai, as well as special guests Dr. Manish Gupta, Director of IBM Research India and Srinath Batni of Infosys Limited.
