About me

Professionally …

I’m a front-end engineer with a passion for UX and a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction. My background is at the intersection of Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction: my peers at Google consider me a skilled prototyper of new products/features.

I was the first engineer on Google Instant and worked solo for 3–4 months designing and prototyping the simple yet powerful UI that Google is known for. Fun fact: When I showed an early prototype to members of the infrastructure team, here’s the reaction I got. After that, I worked together with an ever-increasing team to scale this feature to Google’s billions of users. When Google Instant launched in August 2010, it was referred to as the biggest change to Google since the launch of Google itself.

In early 2011, I collaborated with Chrome engineers and Speech researchers to build and launch Voice Search for Google.com. I was the only engineer from Web Search working on this feature. Voice Search launched to extremely positive press in June 2011.

According to my peers and managers, my skills lie in generating ideas for new features, prototyping them, and perfecting the user experience around them. Most days, I split my time between creating prototypes and demos of new features and on engineering tasks for more established projects.

Academically …

Before joining Google, I obtained my Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from Virginia Tech in 2009. My dissertation on “Mental Workload in Personal Information Management: Understanding PIM Practices Across Multiple Devices” is available from the Virginia Tech library. I also hold a Masters degree in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and a Bachelors from the University of Mumbai. Mumbai (Bombay) is my hometown, to which I return almost every year.

I’m currently writing a book on User Interface Software with my advisor, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones and my friend and colleague, Pardha Pyla, to be published by Taylor and Francis Group / CRC Press.

In a past life as a graduate student, I interned at Google Research in Summer 2007 with Bill Schilit, personalizing clip content in Google Books; in 2005 on Google Desktop, and 2006 on a confidential project.

Personally …

I grew up in midtown Bombay, the financial capital of India, right by the sea.

I’m happily married to Amruta, who’s also from Bombay, and a front-end engineer at IGN. We love to travel, which is how I get to explore my other passion, photography and our shared passion for good food. In a past life, I was in a band — Avataar — at Virginia Tech.