Management

About Riya  |  Staff  |  Management  |  Board of Directors  |  Contact Info

When CEO and Co-Founder, Munjal Shah, took a look at his 38,015 and growing digital photo collection, he saw the need for a tool to help him find the photos he wanted. He also believed that there were many others out there who had the same need. With his prior experience as the CEO and Co-Founder of the successful eBay seller auction management service, Andale he knew nothing was impossible and set out to put together a team to make it happen.

Munjal has an MS in Computer Science from Stanford, a BS from UCSD and was nominated one of the top 10 "Up and Comers" in Business week in 2001. He has previously worked for Baan, IBM and Blaxxun, and co-founded Round Zero, a Web 1.0 networking forum for early stage entrepreneurs.

Munjal is also one of those guys that everybody instantly likes. He's not only a nice guy with great ideas and passion, but he can also blog like a pro. Part of this is due to the fact that he has a passion for life and doesn't believe in limitations.

http://munjal.typepad.com/recognizing_deven/

Burak is the 'brain' behind Riya's photo recognition technology, and leads the research team. It is Burak's desire to bring the usefullness of the computer vision science to human's attention in this exciting venture. His team's current work aligns with this goal and includes detection and recognition of faces, text and objects in photos taken under uncontrolled conditions.

Prior to Riya, he developed computer vision algorithms at Canesta, Intel and BEKO. He has been in the vision field for more than 8 years, published more than 30 papers, and holds more than 15 patent applications. His computer vision algorithms have been prototyped and/or implemented in various computer vision products. He developed a 3D shape representation scheme, called “Random Orthogonal Shape Sections”, which achieved one of the best recognition rates for the detection of colon cancer. His other research concentrated on tracking, detection and recognition of 3D shapes and faces, medical imaging and 3D image compression. Burak received a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science form Bogazici University, and MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Burak is also one helluva soccer player.

http://ai.stanford.edu/~gokturkb/

Azhar Khan is a 'planning poet', which means he has the creativity of a super engineer with the planning skills of a COO.

Azhar has over 13 years experience in the software industry including extensive experience in running successful offshore technology programs. He worked for many years with leading CAD provider Autodesk before founding a collaboration company that was subsequently acquired by Citadon, the largest collaboration software company in the United States. Most recently, he was the Managing Director of India & VP of Engineering at BuildOnline, the largest European provider of collaboration, document management and tendering software. Azhar has a BS from Cornell University and an MS from Stanford.

He manages the engineering team in the US and India as well as coordinates the entire company.

Mark is tasked with making Riya synonymous with image search, fine-tuning the company's business model and with driving revenues. (His favorite Riya search is a photo of a $100 bill.)

Mark brings approximately 20 years of business development, sales and executive management experience to Riya. He was most recently at Tribal Fusion, where he was head of business development and general manager of its two performance marketing divisions. Previous startup experience include President & COO of Pivia, Inc. (purchased by Swan Labs, then by F5) and VP Corporate Development at Owners.com.

Prior to Tribal Fusion, Mark led the eBusiness Group at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, where his scope of responsibilities ranged from strategic planning, business development, site production, and vendor management. Mark holds a BA from Pomona College and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.