Riya Staff

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 from 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/

Whatever it is, Vincent is on top of it! Most likely, it's a boulder, a tree, a mountain, or the technology that reads the text inside your photos. Vincent can usually be spotted in the wild hanging from some cliff in Pinnacles or Yosemite National Park, foraging through used book shops, or rampaging fine Bay Area restaurants with his wife, Joyce.

He is originally from the northwest of France, and graduated from the Ecole Centrale in Paris, moving to Stanford University to pursue a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. He has written a dozen scientific articles in the areas of statistics, speech recognition and user interfaces. Prior to joining Riya, he worked for 6 years in the R&D team at Nuance Communications.

http://vincent.vanhoucke.com/

Did somebody say feta cheese? If you want to win Drago’s favor, just serve him something with feta – he’ll be your friend for life. As well as being a self-proclaimed feta cheese afficionado, Drago brings his experience in Probabilistic Models and Machine Learning to the team. Interpretation: he's the guy who works on integrating all the cues in your pictures into a coherent recognition framework.

His uniqueness comes from the fact that he is Computer Vision and Data Mining and Inference. he focuses on tag extrapolation and spanning.

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

No matter where you stop to rest in Silicon Valley, there is a good chance that Danny will run by you. We’ve never seen a guy cover so much ground as this avid runner. Last December he ran the Honolulu Marathon to raise money for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. But Danny doesn’t only amaze us with his athletic abilitiy, he is also accomplished in face and image similarity.

Danny has an M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford in computer science. B.A. from Harvard in chemistry and physics. He was born in Singapore and grew up in Cincinnati.

Danny's Blog

Kuang-Chih is a work horse. If we didn’t tell him to leave at the end of the day, he wouldn’t sleep or eat. One time we had a fire alarm go off in the building and someone had to run back in to pull him away from his work. His focus is on Face Recognition. His work with David Kriegman was focused on face recognition - one of our advisors from UIUC/UCSD.

When he does get out, he enjoys a challenging match of ping pong or tennis. Kuang-chih is also a classical music afficinado and plays the piano and guitar. How does he find the time?!

http://vision.ucsd.edu/~leekc/

Diem was born in Hanoi, Vietnam. In 1996, he won a scholarship to study in Australia and chose the Monash University. He fondly remembers his 5 wonderful years living in Melbourne, a green and peacefull city in the south of Australia. Diem first arrived in the US in 2002 for post graduate study at UC San Diego. Diem is Proud to be one of the first employees of Riya in April 2005.

Diem's freetime is divided into movies, tennis and hanging out with friends. Diem is the self-proclaimed 'world's worst drinker'. A small glass of beer at lunch could take him down for the afternoon. He is also, coincidentally, really into photography (I wonder why he joined our team?). He’s been showing off his new Cannon Rebel XP, and we’re all jealous.

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.

Benjamin Lee hails from Altus, OK; occasionally known for tornadoes and baseball-size hail. He picked up his BSEE and a wife in Ithaca, NY at Cornell University.

Ben is a modern day Renaisance man. He likes to read, travel, play musical instruments, and solve differential equations. When he's not tinkering with hardware and code, he likes to spend his time with his family and two boys. On special occasions, he likes to mix potent potables for the purpose of stripping paint and tonsils, and bakes a mean sugar-free chocolate amaretto cheesecake. It is rumored that he can impressively cut a rug.

Dan Chiao was discovered by his parents in a crater outside of Smallville, Kansas. To his chagrin, he hasn't yet developed any super powers; but he *is* devastatingly handsome.

Dan is one of the dumbest smart people you'll ever meet. When he's not cooking spaghetti (code, that is), he can often be found searching for his wallet and keys, tripping and falling down, or leaving coffee mugs on top of his car. Dan was the Staff Workaholic at MarketTools, Inc. before coming to Riya. He also drank his way through a BSCS at Cornell.

Dan doesn't have free time any more, but if he did, he'd enjoy hoops, action sports, beer, and reading history books. He's deathly afraid of centipedes, Shiitake mushrooms, and the baby-faced sun from the Teletubbies.

Neelesh is the office fashionista. He doesn't only look good, he is also smart. Neelesh is responsible for architecting Riya's solution. He produces prodigious amounts of code (built three of his own sites on the side) and has an amazing positive attitude. Prior to joining Riya, he was at Ofoto. He architected and integrated Ofoto with all the Kodak labs across United States for distributed and express fulfillment. Beside coding he enjoys working out and traveling.

Neelesh received his Bachelor of Science (honors) in Computer Science from Bhopal University.

Nitin, though seemingly very common, has always shown properties which make him very unique. After formal schooling, against all odds, he made it to the prestigious IIT Roorkee for Industrial Engineering and succeeded in gaining a strong background in computer programming, and of course, a bachelors degree. He is still loved by his (ex)-batchmates for his talent in programming, humourous nature and sincere attitude. For him, Systat in Bangalore was the first brief encounter with the real world, followed by a not-so-brief stint in Talisma.

Now the identifying feature of Nitin, his passion, and more precisely the fire inside, brought him to capital region where he tried his hands at entrepreneurship with a small team. Presently he is enjoying his work at Riya and loves to read books. If he gets spare time he spends it with his friends watching movies & sports.

Sandeep was our first team member in India. Born and brought up in Rajnandgaon, a tranquil central Indian town. He picked up his B.Tech(Computer Science) from the IT-BHU, India in the year 2000. Prior to joining Riya, he worked in product development companies - Andale, Tavant Technologies and River Run Software.

As Sandeep's name suggests, when he joins a company, the company and the people around him simply "Gain". Apart from architecting, designing and coding, he likes spending time with friends over coffee and researching the Indian Equity market.

Sandeep loves music and partying. However, being single he always struggles to get stag entry in Bangalore's happening pubs.

Vineet is the Java guy at Riya. Born in the cold mountains of Shimla, Vineet is as cool as ice , but melts at slighest provocation. Vineet's favourite pastimes include lying on bed and reading magazines and reading anything Calvin and Hobbes. He is self-admittedly big-time lazy.

Unlike some of his flirtatious coworkers, Vineet is scared to death by a girl's proximy. He is a great fan of Murphy's Laws and concedes to them every time. Currently, he is conducting research on people who are getting married or have already committed to it, believing there is a direct correlation to suicidal tendancy.

He obtained his Masters Of Computer Applications from IIT Roorkee

Sowmya Karnad is the Director India Operations in the Riya India office. She is a ball of fire with a can-do attitude. She has loads of experience building start ups and worked previously with Munjal at Andale.

In regards to Sowmya's hobbies and interests: she is the sporty type and has represented the State and her university in throwball and badminton championships. She is also a very adventurous person.

Sowmya graduated Bangalore University with her Bachelor of Commerce, an essential degree for someone handling a start up spread across several countries.

Ginto could not resist the temptation to join a team which Azhar described as -"somewhere in the blurred line between Genius and Insane". Since he had worked for Munjal earlier, he had a fair idea where he is heading to. In his previous company Andale, Ginto had built the network operations center and managed it hands-on for three years.

He will focus on the maintenance of production network while also being the go to person for IT in india. He is fast forgetting all the EE he learned during his B.tech, but compensates for it with copious supplies of linux, hardware and networking. He often gets lost in reading anything and everything comes his way, and in recent history, he has been rescued several times from that wilderness called the blogosphere.

He loves cooking some nice keralite dishes for his wife Archana when he gets time. He plays guitar only for his wife. He is addicted to Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip. And one day he will start teaching in some school and probably write few books.

http://ginrocks1.blogspot.com/

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/

Uma is a true ‘artiste’. He is always exploring some funky art medium or other. He expresses himself in a wide variety of disciplines, including graphic design, photography, batik painting, chocolate body painting (we just threw that in), web design and product user experience design.
His favorite color is white, which plays a large part in many of his designs. He’s the guy on the team yelling, “more white space!” while the rest of us drive Uma crazy with clutter.

Uma's Visual Communication degree is from Madras University and is apparent in the clean, simple lines within his design work.

Karl Dawson is a popular color commentator for World Cup soccer on Univision. He was favored to win a 2003 Emmy, but lost due to hanging chads.

In the offseason, Karl moonlights as the market research analyst here at Riya. He's big on qualitative research, including stakeholder interviews, focus groups, and other time-consuming activities that require him to sleep under his desk. Bottom line is, if there's something you don't like about Riya, it's Karl's fault (j/k).

Prior to joining Riya, Karl built databases, designed surveys, and analyzed policy at the American Institutes for Research. He's also wreaked havoc on three "UC" schools, including Davis (BS in Psychology, emphasis in Math and minor in Film Studies), UCLA (MA in Social Research Methodology), and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Karl's high school classmates voted him "Most Likely to Fall Down"; he puts this skill to (sometimes tragic) use in various sports and on the slopes of Lake Tahoe. He's also a shameless bookworm, film aficionado, and a sucker for new music and PB & J sandwiches.

Bala used to feel that he did not belong in computer science. During his undergraduate education, he never realized the word "science" was part of his CSE degree. His Masters work changed his entire outlook towards computer science and life for the better.

Growing up, Bala always wanted to be a soldier, then a journalist, then a police officer, then a Foreign Service official. His latest dream is to work for the rural masses as an entrepreneur.

Bala loves people and cannot live in isolation. He loves Hyderabad (his hometown), its by-lanes and Hyderabadi slang. He likes to play with English words and loves learning new Indian languages. He has a large circle of friends and is currently building one more in Bangalore. Recently, he discovered a passion for traveling.

Bala loves almost every sport (except golf) and follows them all with equal diligence.

Nikhil was born in Bhopal, brought up in various cities in India and comes from a long line of people who are highly educated. He joined Bell Labs Bangalore (his dream job at the time) after graduating from the IT BHU. There he matured from a naive programmer to an engineer.

Nikhil wanted more out of life and dreamed of a job where his work could shine. So he spent a few months in Scalent where he came across his friend, Sandeep (college classmate). Sandeep introduced him to Munjal...and the rest is history. Today he is happily cranking out code, day & night.

If he is not at the office you could find him shopping with his wife Nidhi. He loves travelling and has been to a list of destinations too long for this short bio. Nikhil is also a firm believer in God. In sports he is jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none, but will put up a good competition in most of them. He thinks he is an exact replica of Linda Goodman's Aquarian.

After graduating from Harvard with a degree in Economics, Ann lived and worked in New York, London, San Francisco, Paris and the Cote d'Azur. She is a renaissance woman who left the world of investment banking to travel and photograph the world. Ann is also passionate about cooking, spent over a year in Paris, learning all about French cuisine and culture.

She agreed to become Munjal's Technical Assistant for insight into the CEO's second successful venture. As part of a 360 degree view of the company, Ann is currently working on the Business Development effort with Mark Moran.

Manisha's smiling face is the first thing you see when you come to our San Mateo office. She keeps our US staff going with a constant supply of Diet Cokes (administered through IV) and Red Baron's® Four Cheese Pizzas. Manisha was born in Nepal and spent some time in India before finally arriving in California.

Manisha completed her Associate Degree in Economics from Cañada College (not in Canada the country) and will be attending San Jose State University (not in the state of San Jose) this fall 2006. She enjoys travel, swimming, rock climbing, bungee jumping (!!!) and hiking.

This is the second time Lorenzo moves to California, where he previously pursued his MS and PhD in computer science at Stanford University. He spent the last three years in Manhattan, doing computer vision research at New York University. Although he is nostalgic of the NY urban life, he is happy to be back on the West Coast where he can enjoy hiking, skiing and mountain biking, just like he used to do in his native Italian Dolomites. He also loves cooking Italian and Thai food, sipping good espresso and... above all, spending time with his little daughter Emilia.

Lorenzo's research interests are in computer vision and statistical learning. He received the Best Student Paper Award (with Riya's co-worker Danny Yang) at the IEEE Conference On Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2001, for his work on visual tracking and 3D reconstruction of non-rigid objects. His previous experience includes working as a researcher at Digital Persona, on design of fingerprint recognition.

http://cs.stanford.edu/~ltorresa

Baris received his BS degree from Bogazici University, Turkey in both electrical engineering and mathematics in 1998. He received the MS
degree in 2000 and the PhD degree in 2004 in electrical and computer engineering from University of California at Santa Barbara. From 2004 to 2006, he has been a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara Center for Bio-Image Informatics. His research interests include image segmentation and data mining in large multimedia databases.

Tanvir is a passionate designer and coder who loves anything dealing with pixels.  He's been in software for the last 15 years with deep
experience in a broad spectrum of areas from building compilers, to low-level 3D graphics drivers, to advanced lighting algorithms for
games, to architecting patented supply chain optimization algorithms, to architecting patented software-managing-software algorithms.

He is part of the Cornell mafia here at Riya, with a 1991 BS in Electrical Engineering.  Don't mess with him in a fragfest, 'cause he'll get ya!

Born in the holy city of Varanasi, Amod is quite a bit spiritual in nature and loves discussions on Yoga and meditation. On the flipside, he's a technology maniac. He likes collecting cutting edge hardware, especially for gaming.

He loves systems level programming, including networking, and enjoys bringing in some of that knowledge to the Java world. Though mostly a
Java guy now, he still keeps a lot in touch with the OS and networking codes, and simply loves reading about any new technology.

Though his lovely wife, Megha, prefers to call his gaming computer his first love (the new laptop has recently been classified as the second),
the fact is, her's would be the only love in his life.....Now if only he could get her to enjoy Doom3 !!

He graduated from IIT Kharagpur, and hopes to utilize his copious amounts of energy in getting Riya to the top.

When Sajan came to Bangalore for his Masters in Computer Application during the dotcom boom, everyone he knew in the IT industry were busy coding and learning core java. He also jumped on the java bandwagon but eventually  reailized he was getting more and more fascinated by UI development methodologies and standards. He enjoys Ajax coding and writing CSS for cross browser environments. Sajan has worked with companies like Andale and IBM and worked on various UI related technologies including a CRM domain.

During his free time, he watches movies and read books. He also enjoys blogging and road trips to hill stations during vacations.

http://www.ajaxination.com

Biswaroop grew up in Ranchi, where he was the schoolmate of India's most famous wicketkeeper. He went to school at IIT Kanpur to earn his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering. After that he was off to University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada for his M.S.

Amidst hiking and camping in the Canadian Rockies and getting used to temperatures of -30 Celsius, he completed his studies. Next stop was
Siemens Medical Solutions, USA for a 4 month internship working on ultrasound images. It was during his internship that he came across Riya
and was hired for the R&D team in India.

Now in Bangalore, Biswaroop hopes to be able to enhance his skills in the Computer Vision/ Machine Learning domain while working with the
amazing research team at Riya. He also would like to complete a marathon sometime in the future.

Before joining Riya, Xiaofan spent over 5 years in HP Labs as a Research Scientist and later as a Senior Research Scientist, working on high-volume document analysis and recognition, digital publishing, and speech signal processing. Before HP, he worked on the recognition engine of OmniPage, the most popular OCR software, in Caere/Scansoft (now called Nuance). Xiaofan received his Ph.D. degree in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in 1999. With numerous publications and patent applications, he is a Senior Member of IEEE and the co-chair of SPIE Conference on Document Recognition and Retrieval 2007.

One of his proudest achievements was in 1989, when he was one of the five high school students selected in China to participate in the 20th International Physics Olympiad and he won a third prize. Sometime he wonders what life would have been like if he had become a physicist rather than a computer scientist.

http://xiaofan.lin.googlepages.com/home

Pallavi joined Riya in March 2006. Prior to Riya, she was a technical staff member at Oracle. She obtained her Masters in CS from IIT Kanpur in 2005. Her interest in Data Mining and Machine Learning attracted her towards Riya.

Her hobbies are listening to music and reading short stories. In leisure time, she likes to play with her 8 months old niece, chat with friends and blogging

http://ppallavi.blogspot.com

Dhiraj was born and brought up in a rusty and dusty country village, and was a big-time amateur swimmer in his childhood. He can often be found solving puzzles like Sudoku. He is crazy about Dilbert cartoons but thinks
himself to be more like Dogbert.  He loves driving, but because he doesn't have a driver's license, he drives a Ferrari at the speed that
will make Schumacher run for cover in "Need For Speed."

Prior to joining Riya, Dhiraj has worked in Accenture and Amdocs. He did his MCA from IIT Roorkee. He believes, the days he spent at Roorkee were the golden days of his life.

He is from north India but been moving around several places all over the country. He did his graduation in Commerce. Started his career with Dell and then moved to Andale (munjal's last company) and now at Riya as a customer service manager.

He is a vivacious reader and a movie buff too. He fool around with his dog when at home. He love to travel when time permits. He is a big heavy metal fan (He think he is getting old). But offlate he is really into classic rock and lot of blues n jazz. He is regular at most of the rock pubs here in Bangalore and manage to get in without having to pay cover for the entry ;-) he is an absolute foodie and keep trying out new places. Also, as you see from his pic, he is incapable of smiling when in front of a camera :-)

Murali is the answer to the trivia question Who is the youngest member of the engineering team at Riya. He holds a BTech in Quake 3 from IIT Madras(his degree reads Computer Science though). He spent a little over a year at Trilogy before joining Riya in Sep '06.

He loves sport in general, and basketball in particular. His idea of the perfect weekend evening in Bangalore is to spend it playing basketball. He does not spend too many weekends in town though; he goes on treks or bike trips whenever he can find company.

He dreams of going on a year long world tour someday.

While the rest of them at India office is busy building the riya solution and enhancing it, Nagaraj is the one who makes sure that they get everything they need. He has taken facility management and office administration to the next level. He never lets any of us worry about may a things like travel schedules, insurance claims, office supplies, catering or even arranging flowers for our loved ones on a valentines day. He just finished readying up a whole new office space for us in record time.

Nagaraj has an interesting past in which he was once an undercover police informer, a security officer, and a facility administrator. His hobbies include watching kannada movies and listening to vedic chants.