Navin Kabra
https://punetech.com/navin, navin@smriti.com.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/navinkabra
101B, Twin Towers, D.P. Road, Aundh, Pune, 411 007. Phone: +91 98220 20096
For the latest copy of this resume see: https://punetech.com/resume/resume.html. While I am open to part-time consulting and advisory roles, I am not interested in a full-time job. Please do not contact me with job offers.
Summary
I am a software technology professional with 30+ years of experience in the industry.
My full-time job is as a co-founder co-founder and CTO at Reliscore.com, a startup focused on helping companies filter job candidates based on the evaluation of actual job-related skills. In addition, I am a visiting professor of practice at IIT Bombay in the TrustLab, Computer Sciences Department, an advisor for Innoviti (a Fintech company in the payments processing space), a volunteer with iSPIRT on the BADAL project, and on the Advisory Committee of NIDHI-EIR-PEP and NIDHI-PRAYAS-PC (Govt. of India initiatives in the innovation/incubation space) . I am 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 a wannabe YouTuber.
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 am currently interested in tech-enabled education and skills assessment, fintech—bitcoin/blockchain, and payments processing, and quant finance—and AI/GenAI. I’m still very much hands-on—I do a lot of programming myself, and I actively keep track of the latest developments in the field.
Education
Ph.D. in Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA, June
1999.
Advisor: Prof. David J. DeWitt
Dissertation: Query Optimization for Object-Relational Database Systems
M.S. in Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA, May 1994.
B.Tech. in Computer Science, Indian Institute of Technology-Mumbai, India, May 1992.
Professional Experience
ReliScore.com, Pune, India, Mar
2012–present
Roles: Co-founder and CTO
ReliScore.com is a software platform that enables companies to identify suitable candidates by presenting
challenges in relevant areas of interest, accompanied by job postings. We have technology to
auto-evaluate responses of candidates in various domains including, programming, testing/QA,
support, devops, system/database administration, and more. The same technology is also used by
companies for ongoing assessments of employees to identify training requirements, pre- and
post-training benchmarking, and also for programming contests for branding or employee
engagement.
TrustLab, CSE Dept, IIT Bombay, Feb
2024–present
Role: Visiting Professor of Practice
In this role, I will be teaching courses and collaborating on projects with the faculty and students of IIT
Bombay in the areas of cryptography, AI, and education and assessment technology.
iSPIRT, Pune, India, Mar
2022–present
Role: Volunteer
iSPIRT is a technology think-tank which works on building public goods in India, for example those based
on the India Stack. I am a volunteer on the BADAL project, a Distributed Ledger for accelerating trusted
commerce in India. The idea is to build a distributed ledger for privacy-preserving trustful commerce
using ideas from the cryptocurrency world, especially Zero-Knowledge Proofs. It is proposed as an
interoperable fabric underlying a future programmable economy across large and small businesses to
create high trust economy. We also look at the emergence of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)
which is one of the core money applications of this framework and global backdrop in Annexure. There are
many other use cases being proposed from land records to decentralised clinical trials for blockchain and
allied technologies in different areas of government and business1 likewise, that can be implemented in
BADAL.
Innoviti Payment Solutions, Bangalore, India, July
2007–present
Role: Advisory Board
Innoviti is a software product company in the payments processing space whose primary products include
a payments automation gateway for retail merchant businesses, and a dealer trade credit platform for
SMEs.
I advise on multiple aspects of technology, including architecture, performance, security, as well as senior tech hiring decisions.
TheFutureIQ, YouTube, Nov
2022–present
Role: YouTuber
On my YouTube channel, I create educational videos on various topics: science and technology, finance,
career guidance, economics, game theory, psychology, and more.
Venture Center Science Business Incubator, Pune, India, March
2017–present
Role: Advisory Committee Member, NIDHI-EIR-PEP, NIDHI-PRAYAS-PC
NIDHI - National Initiative for Developing and Harnessing Innovations - is an umbrella programme
conceived and developed by the Department of Science & Technology (DST), Government of India, for
nurturing knowledge-based and technology-driven ideas and innovations into successful start-ups.
PRAYAS - Promoting and Accelerating Young and ASpiring innovators & startups - is a programme that
provides grants and a platform to idea-stage entrepreneurs with a physical product offering, who require
support for prototyping. EIR - Entrepreneur in Residence - is a programme that provides a
stipend, mentorship, office and lab space to young and innovative entrepreneurs for pursuing a
promising technology business idea. The idea is to inspire the best talents to be entrepreneurs, to
minimise the risk involved in pursuing start- ups, and to partially set off their opportunity costs
of high paying jobs. Venture Center is a Government of India initiated science/technology
business incubator, housed in NCL-Pune, providing services to entrepreneurs and startups
offering products and services exploiting scientific expertise in the areas of materials, chemicals
and biological sciences & engineering. Venture Center is a Programme Execution Partner
(PEP) for the NIDHI-EIR programme, and a Prayas-Center (PC) for the NIDHI-PRAYAS
programme.
I am a member of the committees of both - the NIDHI-PRAYAS-PEP and NIDHI-EIR-PC programmes - and am involved in selections of the entrepreneurs/startups and monitoring progress on a regular basis.
FinIQ, Pune, India, May 2007–Oct
2020
Role: Technology Consultant
FinIQ is a banking software product company, specialising in pricing, dealing & processing of treasury &
wealth management structured products, supporting FX, forwards, options, accumulators, TRF, equity
linked, range accruals, baskets, structured notes, credit linked, IR linked, IRS, CDS, equity swap,
cash equity (incl corporate actions), mutual funds and unit trusts, regular and exotic bonds,
DCI with workflows for retail, commercial, private wealth as well as corporate banking can
be automated including client pricing request, electronic pricing (via models or multi-dealer
links), order management, trade capture, documentation, settlement, mid life event processing,
redemption and accounting. FinIQ customers include 25 banking groups all over the world (75
banks).
I was a consultant and advisor for various aspects of technology, including architecture, performance, security, mentoring juniors, as well as skill enhancement, learning and development.
GenWise, Bangalore, India, April
2018–present
Roles: Teacher, Mentor
GenWise offers middle- and high-school students introductory courses in new and emerging disciplines
through high quality mentors from around the world with expertise in a diverse spread of contemporary
areas and the ability to teach engagingly. The focus is on creating life-long learners who love to explore
beyond their formal curriculum.
At GenWise, I’ve been teaching a number of courses in areas that I find fascinating: Modern Cryptography, Game Theory, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technologies, and Defense Against the Dark Arts (which is an introduction to critical thinking, and inoculation against fake news), and more.
PuneTech.com, Pune, India, Dec
2007–present
Roles: Founder and Chief Editor
PuneTech.com is a hyper-local news-magazine that caters to the technology professionals and
entrepreneurs in Pune, India. PuneTech covers the companies, user groups and organizations, people,
technologies, news and events related to technology in Pune. PuneTech also organizes offline events,
maintains the tech events calendar for Pune, and is generally a forum for the community to interact, find
customers, collaborators, co-founders, employees and other interactions. With 3000+ subscribers, a
linked-in group that is the largest Pune-related group on linked-in, and 10000+ highly targeted
visitors per month, PuneTech has become one of the most important technology platforms in
Pune.
BharatHealth.com, Pune, India, Mar 2009–Mar
2012
Roles: Co-founder and CTO
BharatHealth.com is a software-as-a-service offering targeted towards doctors and patients with
long-term medical conditions. It is currently being used by doctors and patients in Pune,
India.
Tap ’n Tap, Pune, India, May 2009–Dec
2011
Roles: Consultant and Advisor
Tap ’n Tap builds modular software products (apps, platforms, and cloud-based solutions) for the Android
ecosystem that allow OEMs, manufacturers, operators and retailers to ship enhanced versions of the
Android OS to strategically differentiate themselves from other players.
My role was to help build out their India-based development team, including key responsibilities in hiring, on-boarding of employees, and mentoring and guidance to the juniors and smooth handover
Veritas (Symantec at that time), Pune, India, Aug 2002–Dec
2007
Roles: Senior Researcher; CTO’s Staff
I was a part of Symantec Research Labs (SRL), which builds prototypes of emerging technologies to
determine whether they can be productized. Some of the projects I was involved in: 1) the use of
statistical techniques to analyze corporate communications data (i.e. e-mail) for preventing leakage of
sensitive data, 2) the use of data-mining algorithms to automatically detect configuration anomalies and
other mistakes in large enterprise data-centers, and 3) the application of information retreival algorithms
to automatically detect variants in malware samples. In some projects, I had a hands on role
where I did everything from the conceptualization and design, to the actual implementation
and programming. In other projects, my role was more architectural - setting the direction,
guiding the team, resolving conflicts, and evangelizing the idea across the company. I also
worked in Symantec India’s CTO office on various programs to increase technical vitality in the
company, to foster innovation, to improve the patents programme, and to mentor and guide junior
engineers.
Quiq Incorporated, Madison, Wisconsin, USA and Pune, India, Feb 2000–Jun
2002
Role: Senior Product Architect and Principal Developer
Quiq Inc. was a company that provided software and services for Internet based Customer Support and
eCRM (Customer Relationship Management). I was responsible for the design and implementation of
the core search engine used in the product suite. We devised a novel index structure that
incorporated both relational as well as text data. It provided for dynamic updatability (to
reduce scheduled downtime), partitioned and replicated parallelism (for high availability),
recoverability (from crashes as well as media failure), and support for a large number of simultaneous
users.
Teradata Corporation (NCR Corp. at that time), Madison, Wisconsin, USA, Mar 1998–Jan
2000
Role: Module Architect and Project Leader
Worked on the Teradata Object-Relational DBMS (TOR), a scalable, parallel, object-relational database
management system. I was involved in various aspects of the architecture of the system, and design and
development of individual features. Specific work includes: sole responsibility for design and
implementation of user-defined functions (UDFs) in TOR, and of views in the query language; project
leader of 2-person and 3-person teams to design and implement generalized user-definable
aggregate operators in TOR, and design of text and spatial “data-blades” based on third-party
software.
University of Wisconsin–Madison, Wisconsin, USA, Jun 1993–Feb
1998
Role: Research Assistant
Part of the team that designed and developed the Paradise Scalable Object-Relational DBMS. I worked
on the project from its inception until it was acquired by Teradata Corporation (part of NCR at
that time) in 1998. I had full responsibility of a number of modules of the software including
the query parser, the optimizer, and parts of the scheduler. In addition, I worked on various
aspects of the system including the extended data-types, the client interfaces, and the system
catalogs.
University of Wisconsin–Madison, Wisconsin, USA, Sept 1992–May
1993
Role: Teaching Assistant
Conducted lectures and discussion sessions on Numerical Methods, Data Structures, and Introductory
Pascal.
Indian Institute of Technology–Mumbai , India, Sept 1990–Dec
1991
Role: Teaching Assistant
Conducted discussion sessions for an introductory computing course for college freshmen.
Selected Patents
I am an inventor on 18 US Patents, 2 European Patents, and 1 Japanese Patent, filed as part of 3 different
companies. Here are some selected ones:
“Method and apparatus for generating configuration rules for computing entities within a computing environment using association rule mining” with Neeran Karnik and Subhojit Roy. US Patent Number 1998252, European Patent Number 8051028, Japanese Patent Number 2009048611. Assigned to Veritas Technologies.
“Method and apparatus for detecting web-based electronic mail in network traffic” with Basant Rajan and Chirag Dalal. Assigned to Veritas Technologies.
“Coherency of replicas for a distributed file sharing system” with Anindya Banerjee et al. Assigned to Veritas Technologies.
“Adaptive Caching for a Distributed File System” with Dilip Ranade and Radha Shelat. Assigned to Veritas Technologies.
“Global monitoring and statistics collection for a plurality of computing nodes” with Radha Shelat et. al.. Assigned to Veritas Technologies.
“Efficient distributed transaction protocol for a distributed file sharing system” with Anindya Banerjee et. al.. Assigned to Veritas Technologies.
“Unified Database and Text Retrieval System.” with Raghu Ramakrishnan, Uri Shaft and Vuk Ercegovac. Assigned to Quiq Incorporated.
“Method and apparatus for evaluating index predicates on complex data types using virtual indexed streams.” with Jignesh Patel. Assigned to NCR Corporation.
“Method and apparatus for parallel execution of trigger actions” with 4 other inventors. U.S. Patent Number 673,2084, European Patent Number 1111516 Assigned to NCR Corporation.
See the US Patent Database more of my patents.
Ph.D. Thesis Research
Dynamic Query Optimization in Database Query Processing:
Designed and implemented Dynamic Re-Optimization, an algorithm that dynamically detects
sub-optimality of a query execution plan during query execution and improves performance by
re-optimizing the query. Statistics are collected at key points during the execution of a complex query, and
are then used to optimize the execution of the query, either by improving the resource allocation for that
query, or by changing the execution plan for the remainder of the query. To ensure that this does not
significantly slow down the normal execution of a query, the Query Optimizer carefully chooses what
statistics to collect, when to collect them, and the circumstances under which to re-optimize the
query.
Extensible Query Optimization:
Designed and Implemented OPT++, a tool that uses an object-oriented design to simplify the
task of implementing, extending, and modifying an optimizer. Building an optimizer using
OPT++ makes it easy to extend the query algebra (to incorporate new query algebra operators
and physical implementation algorithms in the optimizer), easy to change the search space
explored, and also easy to change the search strategy used. Furthermore, OPT++ comes
equipped with a number of optimization techniques and search strategies that are available for
use by an Optimizer-Implementor. Conducted a performance study that validates the design
of OPT++ and shows that in spite of its flexibility, OPT++ can be used to build efficient
optimizers.
Query Optimization in Object-Relational Database Systems:
Used OPT++ to implement and study a number of different optimization techniques and
search strategies and how they interact with each other. Implemented a number of search
strategies including dynamic-programming (System-R style), Simulated Annealing, Iterated
Improvement, Two-Phase Optimization, and A*. Implemented a number of optimization techniques
to handle join enumeration, expensive predicates, reference-valued attributes, path indexes,
set-valued attributes, abstract data-types with methods, and spatial operations. For each
optimization technique, studied how effective it is, and how it is affected by the choice of search
strategy.
Refereed Publications
“Mass Collaboration: A Case Study” with Raghu Ramakrishnan et. al. International Database
Engineering and Applications Symposium (IDEAS-04). Coimbra, Portugal, July 2004.
“The QUIQ Engine: A Hybrid IR–DB System.” with Raghu Ramakrishnan and Vuk Ercegovac. International Conference on Data Engineering, Bangalore, India, March 2003.
“Opt++: An Object-Oriented Design for Extensible Database Query Optimization.” with David J. DeWitt. The VLDB Journal. Volume 8 Issue 1, January 1999.
“Efficient Re-Optimization of Sub-Optimal Query Execution Plans.” with David J. DeWitt. Proceedings of the 1998 SIGMOD Conference, Seattle, Washington, June 1999.
“Building A Scalable GeoSpatial Database System: Technology, Implementation and Evaluation.” with the Paradise Team. Proceedings of the 1997 SIGMOD Conference, Tucson, Arizona, May 1997.
“Client-Server Paradise.” with David J. DeWitt, Jun Luo, Jignesh M. Patel and Jie-Bing Yu. Proceedings of the 20th VLDB Conference, Santiago, Chile, September 1994.
References available upon request.