Vijay Pandurangan

Vijay Pandurangan
Born Montreal, Canada
Residence San Francisco, California, U.S.
Alma mater Carnegie Mellon University
Occupation Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark (venture capital firm)

Vijay Pandurangan is a Canadian computer scientist and internet entrepreneur and expert on online privacy. He was an early engineer at Google from 2002-2009 and published papers on data storage technologies.[1][2][3] He co-founded Mitro in 2013 which was then sold to Twitter. Pandurangan then became head of the Twitter New York engineering office.[4] In this role at Twitter he was responsible for the launch of Twitter products such as the highly-anticipated Twitter Moments. He also posted about the high use of Google Hangouts inside Twitter and their usefulness to remote teams.[5][6] His teams also contributed bug fixes to the Linux kernel.[7]

He departed Twitter in 2016 along with several other senior Twitter executives as the company struggled to turn itself around in the face of declining user growth.[8][9]

In October 2016 Pandurangan was hired as entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark (venture capital firm) and he relocated from New York to San Francisco.[10] He is an occasional guest writer for Wired (magazine) and has written on topics such as the success of Snapchat's success in the context of Twitter's stumbles.[11]

Early life

Pandurangan was born and raised in Montreal, Canada.

Other projects

Pandurangan is regularly cited in the press for his various projects in Big data. These projects included a 2014 successful attempt at de-anonymizing New York City taxi data which led to New York City then tightening up access to taxi data.[12] This data was used to identify possible religious backgrounds of particular drivers as well as to determine the tipping behaviors of celebrities.[13][14][15][16]

He also conducted an expose in 2016 showing that Google's SMS-based account recovery can reduce the security of a Google account.[17]

In 2012 he also used big data to analyze color composition of movie posters since the inception of the film industry, showing the evolution of psychological factors and perception over time.[18][19]

He also in 2012 conducted a conceptual project to peer edit online dating profiles and was interviewed by ABC News as part of the project.[20]

References

  1. "Vijay Pandurangan – EIR at Benchmark". www.vijayp.ca. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  2. "Vijay Pandurangan: Executive Profile & Biography - Businessweek". www.bloomberg.com. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  3. Ganger, G. R.; Khosla, P. K.; Bakkaloglu, M.; Bigrigg, M. W.; Goodson, G. R.; Oguz, S.; Pandurangan, V.; Soules, C. A. N.; Strunk, J. D. (2001-01-01). "Survivable storage systems". DARPA Information Survivability Conference amp; Exposition II, 2001. DISCEX '01. Proceedings. 2: 184–195 vol.2. doi:10.1109/DISCEX.2001.932171.
  4. Lynley, Matthew. "An Interview With Alex Roetter, Twitter's Head Of Engineering". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  5. "Improving communication across distributed teams | Twitter Blogs". blog.twitter.com. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  6. "The unsung hero of meetings at Twitter is Google Hangouts". Fortune. 2015-09-04. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  7. Nbn; Security; Science; Cisco; Google; People don't want big OpenFlow deployments, so let's do small ones; authentication, Don't take a Leaf out of this book: Nissan electric car app has ZERO; MWC, NFV players push their wares to mobile operators at. "Confused by crazy crashes? Check your Linux kernel virtual Ethernet code". Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  8. Truong, Alice. "More proof that Twitter is a sinking ship". Quartz. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  9. "The 2 guys who led Twitter's biggest product launch in years are no longer at the company". Business Insider. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  10. "Benchmark hires Vijay Pandurangan | PitchBook News". Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  11. Pandurangan, Vijay. "The Key to Snapchat's Profitability: It's Dirt Cheap to Run". WIRED. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  12. "Poorly anonymized logs reveal NYC cab drivers' detailed whereabouts". Ars Technica. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  13. Hern, Alex (2014-06-27). "New York taxi details can be extracted from anonymised data, researchers say". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  14. "Sticky data: Why even 'anonymized' information can still identify you". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  15. Franceschi-Bicchierai, Lorenzo. "Redditor cracks anonymous data trove to pinpoint Muslim cab drivers". Mashable. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  16. Trotter, J.K. "Public NYC Taxicab Database Lets You See How Celebrities Tip". Gawker. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  17. "Giving Google Your Mobile Number Could Make Your Gmail Account Less Secure, Expert Warns". The Huffington Post. 2016-10-21. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  18. Condliffe, Jamie. "The Evolution of Movie Poster Colors, Visualized". Gizmodo. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  19. "The History Of Movie Posters Shows Our Changing Color Bias Over Time". Complex. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  20. News, A. B. C. (2014-06-09). "How to Let Your Friends Run Wild With Your Dating Profile". ABC News. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
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