About Me

I did my undergraduate studies in Computer Science at BITS-Pilani, Goa (India).

Most definitely, the best four years of my life. Then, I worked for 9 months at Cisco Systems, when I decided that I needed to spend a few more years as a student to figure out what to do with my life.

That brought me to UW-Madison.

And now, two years later, I find myself at a similar spot again. Apparently, it isn’t simple to figure out what to do with your life.  I learned a lot at Madison though. I came to the university, feeling most confident about my DotA skills than anything else.

I leave Madison a lot more confident in my CS (no, I don’t mean Counter Strike..) skills, with the experience of working on a myriad of projects and learning from some fabulous professors. I’ve also become a mac fanboy in the process!

As part of grad coursework, I had the chance to work on lots of crazy stuff like JavaScript API Migration, sabotaging the ext3 file system, motion capture character animation and prototyping a toy for Microsoft Kinect.

Academic & Professional Interests

Graphics and Game Development

Playing computer games has always been a passion of mine and I’m in love with the technical side of making these fabulous pieces of entertainment.

What I like most about it is that you get to apply concepts from several areas in CS in a single piece of software. And at the end of it, the goal is to make the user have fun!

More info of my feeble attempts can be found in the Games page.

The social and mobile gaming space is something that interests me a lot. On my TODO list is working with HTML5 & node.js  and creating some simple games for iOS.

I’m also excited about Microsoft’s Kinect SDK and hope to work on some cool stuff when it comes out.

I used to be interested in networking once upon a time.

I was working on Energy Management in mobile devices with Prof. Aditya Akella in the Fall of 2009. The results of a survey of related work on the topic can be found here.

Other Interests

Music :: I’m a crazy metalhead and love the genre of melodic

death/doom metal. Some of my research (if you can call it that..) in this genre can be found here.

Insomnium and Agalloch are bands that I absolutely cannot do without.

I love recommending good music and cannot stand the fact that certain so called artists (rhymes with beaver, mama ..) are so popular.

Gaming :: I’ve been an avid old school multiplayer gamer for years starting from Age of Empires 2 (my all-time favorite), Age of Mythology, Warcraft 3 TFT, Counter Strike to DotA!

I also claim to love several other things like traveling, photography, cooking and dreaming from time to time.