I live in Pune, India. 

I am a co-founder and CTO at ReliScore.com, a startup focused on helping companies filter job candidates based on evaluation of actual job-related skills. I’m on the Advisory Board of Innoviti (a Fintech company in the payments processing space), the Advisory Committee of NIDHI-EIR-PEP and NIDHI-PRAYAS-PC (Govt. of India initiatives in the innovation/incubation space) and a technology consultant at FinIQ (specializing in derivatives and other structured products). I am also an instructor at GenWise teaching high school students courses on diverse topics, including cryptography, game theory, blockchain technologies, critical thinking, and more. I am also one of the creators of PuneTech.com, a portal for the tech community in Pune, India.

In the past I’ve worked for large companies, and small; I’ve worked in India and in the US; I’ve seen a successful exit, and I’ve seen a dotcom failure; I’ve done product development, and I’ve done research; I’ve written consumer software, and I’ve written enterprise software; and I’ve been a developer, I’ve been an architect, and I’ve been a manager (but hated it).

I’ve done my PhD with David DeWitt in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin in 1999, and a B.Tech. in Computer Sciences from IIT-Bombay before that. I am an inventor on 18 US Patents, 2 European Patents, and 1 Japanese Patent, filed as part of my work for 3 different companies. I’m interested in a number of areas of computer science, including: highly scalable systems; distributed and fault-tolerant software systems; text search, information retrieval, and analysis of unstructured information. My latest interest is the understanding of what drives online communities.

See my resume (HTML, PDF), or my linked-in profile for further details.

For social networking I use: Twitter @ngkabra, Facebook, linked-in (professional contacts). I used to be on Quora (but not active any longer).

Check out these other websites that I am associated with: Punetech.com – technology in Pune (twitter: @punetech), NoBadTouch.com – a simple technique to save children from sexual abuse, my archive of Hindi Song Lyrics (no MP3s, just lyrics!), Meeta’s Hindi Movie Reviews, and my blog of random interesting information from the internet.

You can write to me at: navin@smriti.com.

Essays and Articles

Here are some articles I’ve written that you might find useful. Items marked with are especially popular. (Sorry: this list is out of date; it was last updated in 2014. One of these days, I’ll update it with more recent work (like my introductory blockchain videos: part 1, part 2)

Career and Education Advice

• How to choose an engineering college & branch after 12th std.
• 5 things that Computer Science Engineering students should focus on
• Break ke Baad: Tips for Moms re-entering the IT-workforce after a break
• Why do employees leave startups for big brands

On moving to India/Pune from US

• How do Indians feel when they go back to live in India after living in the US for 5+ years
• Does Sumedh Mungee’s NYT Post about why he moved from India to US again ring true? – on one person’s negative experience, and whether you will face a similar situation.
• Is startup culture growing in India? If so, is it limited only to Bangalore, or is there a startup culture in other cities as well, like Hyderabad, Noida, Pune
• What are the key differences in being a tech entrepreneur in US and India

On Programming / Computer Science

• An overview of Cloud Computing for Beginners
• How do modern websites check user passwords without storing the clear-text password in the database?
• Which programming langauges are most fun to use and why?
• What are the major must-know, should-know, and nice-to-know features of the Python programming language
• Why is Python preferred to Ruby in academia
• What programming skills should I learn in a month?
• Which should I learn, Django or Rails?

On intellectual property

Most people have a very poor understanding of copyrights and patents. Hence, I created this quiz of real-life-like situations involving intellectual properties.

• Do you understand Copyrights and Patents?
• Answers to “Do you understand Copyrights and Patents”

A follow-up to the quiz is this is a series of 5 articles giving a “practical” overview of intellectual property laws:

• Copyrights, Patents & Intellectual Property Rights: An Overview
• Understanding Patents further
• Understanding Copyrights further
• Understanding Open Source Software Licenses
• Copyright issues for bloggers, website owners and other content creators
• Does public disclosure of an invention prevent you from patenting it in India?

Miscellaneous

• If Sachin Tendulkar were a Muslim, would he get the same adulation?
• Why is Amitabh Bachchan such a big deal in Bollywood?
• What is the best definition of Hinduism that you have come across?
• Why your talks/documents/presentations/blogs must contain concrete examples
• The “He will listen if you tell him” syndrome
• Should you shake hands if the person you shake hands with is missing some of his fingers?