Manas Tungare

Email: manas@tungare.name
Web: https://manas.tungare.name

Experience

Senior Engineering Manager (L7), Google Assistant on TVs

2019—now

As the Tech Lead / Manager for Google Assistant on TVs, I nurtured & grew teams delivering multiple impactful launches over several years. Under my leadership & in collaboration with several teams across Google, we launched a brand new product, Chromecast with Google TV, to rave reviews from both users and the press, and continued that momentum by expanding Google TV to 3rd party manufacturers.

• New York Times’s Best Media Streaming Device of the year
• 86/100 from Engadget
• 8/10 from Wired

I made significant organizational & technical contributions to this launch: I improved our release velocity by 4×, managed a higher-than-usual level of chaos, fixed communication issues across 250+ engineers, and strengthened relationships with my colleagues from multiple teams across Google (Nest, Android, Assistant, YouTube, Play).

I am particularly proud of having received a 100% happiness rating from my team each cycle, having grown the number of my team members from underrepresented groups 3× during my tenure, and ramping up a remote team in Bangalore.

I routinely advocate for team health & strongly believe that a positive work/life balance is the only way to sustain ourselves for a long satisfying life & career.

Google Now (aka Feed aka Discover)

2018–2019: I founded and grew a team to 12 engineers across Android, iOS, Web, and Server to build a server-driven cross-platform layout system for the Google Discover Feed. Our solution is now built into Chrome, the Google Search App on Android and iOS, and the Google.com homepage on mobile. Piet is open-source and is available in the Chromium tree.

2016—2017: Assorted projects for Google Now on iOS.

2014-2015: I started a team, eventually growing it to 9 engineers, to create a simpler, more functional, easily updatable Google Now experience for Android Wear watches. The previous Google Now experience was not an app; it was built around notifications only. The Google Now app launched globally to all Android Wear users in 2015, replacing the original Google Now experience.

Google Inbox by Gmail

2013—2014

I was an early engineer on the beloved yet cancelled-too-early Google Inbox. Email is an integral part of our personal information, thus this aligned closely with my dissertation interests.

Google Instant Search

2009—2010: Founding Engineer, OC Award Winner

I prototyped the product that became Google Instant & personally demoed my prototypes to Larry and Sergey, which secured approval for this project. The team grew to several 100s of engineers, and we successfully scaled 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.

Our team was awarded the Operating Committee (OC) Award, given by Google to a select few teams each year, for accomplishments that “merit special recognition when they create significant new value for Google and surpass even our most audacious goals”. With the growth of mobile, Instant Search became less and less relevant, and was retired in 2018.

Hermit, the Lite Apps Browser

2015—now

Hermit, the Lite Apps Browser, is a fresh new take on how Web Apps should exist on a mobile operating system. I designed, authored, and have maintained this project since 2015, and it has over 1 million happy users and a 4.6+ star rating on Google Play.

Education

• Ph.D. in Computer Science & Human Computer Interaction • Virginia Tech. Dissertation: Mental Workload in Personal Information Management: Understanding PIM Practices Across Multiple Devices. (PDF, soft cover).
• Masters in Computer Science specializing in Human-Computer Interaction • Georgia Tech.

Patents

• Predictive Query Completion and Predictive Search Results (the Google Instant patent)

Press Coverage

• Chromecast on Google TV considered by New York Times to be the Best Media Streaming Device of the year.
• Google Voice Search, a feature I helped launch, was covered by the New York Times, CNN, and several other news outlets in early 2011.
• I was profiled by Virginia Tech’s Department of Engineering & the Graduate School at Virginia Tech regarding my work on Google Instant.
• Virginia Tech Magazine ran a short piece on my involvement with Google Instant in their Winter 2010-2011 issue.
• I was profiled by Google’s University Relations team in recognition of the impact of my work soon after starting at Google after school.
• My intern project at Google in 2007 was covered on the Official Google Blog, and I was invited to write about it on the Official Google Book Search Blog. (Sep 2007)
• Additional press coverage by various tech industry publications, including: Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, CNet, Ajaxian, Venture Beat, and several other trade magazines.
• सकाळ, a popular newspaper in Marathi, my native tongue, covered my work on Google Desktop (May 2006).

Publications

1. Mental Workload in Personal Information Management: Understanding PIM Practices Across Multiple Devices

   Manas Tungare Dept. of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, 2009.

2. Mental Workload in Multi-Device Personal Information Management

   Manas Tungare, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones Selected to present at the CHI Student Research Competition, and ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2009 Works-in-Progress, 2009.

3. You Scratch My Back and I’ll Scratch Yours: Combating Email Overload Collaboratively

   Manas Tungare, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones Selected to present at the CHI Student Research Competition, and ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2009 Works-in-Progress, 2009.

4. Continuous User Interfaces for Seamless Task Migration

   Pardha S. Pyla, Manas Tungare, Jerome Holman, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction HCII 2009, 2009.

5. Personal Information Ecosystems: Design Concerns for Net-Enabled Devices

   Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, Manas Tungare, Pardha Pyla, Steve Harrison Proceedings of the VI Latin American Web Congress - LA-Web 2008, 2008.

6. Automatic Syllabus Classification using Support Vector Machines

   Xiaoyan Yu, Manas Tungare, Weiguo Fan, Yubo Yuan, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, Edward A. Fox, William Cameron, Lillian Cassel Handbook of Research on Text and Web Mining Technologies, 2008.

7. Automatic Genre-specific Text Classification

   Xiaoyan Yu, Manas Tungare, Weiguo Fan, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, Edward A. Fox, William Cameron, Lillian Cassel Encyclopedia of Data Warehousing and Mining, 2nd Edition, 2008.

8. Syncables: A Framework to Support Seamless Data Migration Across Multiple Platforms

   Manas Tungare, Pardha S. Pyla, Miten Sampat, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Portable Information Devices (IEEE Portable) 2007, 2007.

9. Using Automatic Metadata Extraction to Build a Structured Syllabus Repository

   Xiaoyan Yu, Manas Tungare, Weiguo Fan, Yubo Yuan, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, Edward A. Fox, William Cameron, Lillian Cassel Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries, 2007.

10. Automatic Syllabus Classification

    Xiaoyan Yu, Manas Tungare, William Cameron, GuoFang Teng and Weiguo Fan, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, Edward A. Fox, Lillian Cassel In Proceedings of the Seventh ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries - JCDL 2007, 2007.

11. Towards a Syllabus Repository for Computer Science Courses

    Manas Tungare, Xiaoyan Yu, William Cameron, GuoFang Teng, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, Edward Fox, Weiguo Fan, Lillian Cassel In Proceedings of the 38th Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) 2007, 2007.

12. An Online Teacher Peer Review System

    Aaron Powell, Scott Turner, Manas Tungare, Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones, Stephen H. Edwards Proceedings of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education International Conference, SITE, 2006.

13. Embodied Data Objects: Tangible Interfaces to Information Appliances

    Manas Tungare, Pardha S. Pyla, Pradyut Bafna, Vladimir Glina, Wenjie Zhang, Xiaoyan Yu, Umut Balli, Steve Harrison Proceedings of the 44th ACM SouthEast Conference (ACM SE 2006), 2006.

14. Evaluation of a Location-Linked Notes System

    Manas Tungare, Ingrid Burbey, Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones, Ananth Raghavan Proceedings of the 44th ACM SouthEast Conference (ACM SE 2006), 2006.

15. Genetic Algorithms and their use in the design of Evolvable Hardware

    Abhishek Joglekar, Manas Tungare IEEE Region 10 Conference for Student Papers (first runner-up prize), 2001.

16. Understanding the Evolution of Users’ Personal Information Management Practices

    Manas Tungare In Proceedings of the Eleventh IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction - INTERACT 2007 Doctoral Consortium, 2007.

17. The Shoebox and the Safe: When Once-Personal Information Changes Hands

    Manas Tungare Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Personal Information Management at CSCW 2012, 2012.

18. Collaborative Human Computation as a Means of Information Management

    Manas Tungare, Ben Hanrahan, Ricardo Quintana-Castillo, Michael Stewart, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Collaborative Information Seeking at CSCW 2010, 2010.

19. From Research Hypotheses to Practical Guidelines: A Proposal to Facilitate Researcher—Practitioner Interaction

    Pardha S. Pyla, Catherine Grevet, Manas Tungare, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones Proceedings of the CHI 2010 Workshop on Researcher-Practitioner Interaction, 2010.

20. Sustainability of Bits, not just Atoms

    Manas Tungare, Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones, Pardha S. Pyla, Ben Hanrahan, Uma Murthy, Ricardo Quintana-Castillo Proceedings of the CHI 2010 Workshop: Examining Appropriation, Re-use, and Maintenance for Sustainability, 2010.

21. Mental Workload at Transitions between Multiple Devices in Personal Information Management

    Manas Tungare, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones Proceedings of the PIM 2009 Workshop: Personal Information Intersections: What happens when PIM spaces overlap?, 2009.

22. Best If Used By: Expiration Dates for Email

    Manas Tungare, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones Proceedings of the CHI 2009 Workshop on Interacting with Temporal Data, 2009.

23. Thinking Outside the (Beige) Box: Personal Information Management Beyond the Desktop

    Manas Tungare, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones Proceedings of the 3rd Invitational Workshop on Personal Information Management, PIM, 2008.

24. Defragmenting Information using the Syncables Framework

    Manas Tungare, Pardha S. Pyla, Miten Sampat, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones Proceedings of the 2nd Invitational Workshop on Personal Information Management at SIGIR, 2006.

25. Multiple User Interfaces: Why Consistency is Not Everything, and Seamless Task Migration is Key

    Pardha S. Pyla, Manas Tungare, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones Proceedings of the CHI 2006 Workshop on The Many Faces of Consistency in Cross-Platform Design, 2006.

26. Towards a Standardized Representation of Syllabi to Facilitate Sharing and Personalization of Digital Library Content

    Manas Tungare, Xiaoyan Yu, GuoFang Teng, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, Edward Fox, Weiguo Fan, Lillian Cassel Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Applications of Semantic Web Technologies for E-Learning (SW-EL) at Adaptive Hypermedia, 2006.

27. Using Web 2.0 Technologies in your Computer Science Classes

    Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, Manas Tungare, Edward A. Fox SIGCSE 2008: ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2008.

28. An Exploratory Study of Calendar Use

    Tungare, Manas, Pérez-Quiñones, Manuel Computing Research Repository (CoRR) 0809.3447, 2008.

29. Personal Information Ecosystems and Implications for Design

    Manas Tungare, Pardha S. Pyla, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, Steve Harrison Computing Research Repository (CoRR) cs/0612081, 2006.

30. A Special Topics Course on Personal Information Management

    Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, Manas Tungare, Pardha S. Pyla, Margaret Kurdziolek TR 06-26, Virginia Tech, Dept. of Computer Science, 2006.

31. Performance Evaluation of Navigation Approaches on High-resolution Displays

    Suraj Menon, Cyril Montabert, Manas Tungare, Chris North TR 07-22, Virginia Tech Dept. of Computer Science, 2005.

32. Increasing the Adoption of Public Transport Through Multi-Platform Social Networking

    Manas Tungare, Mithilesh Kumar, Yoon Lee, Gyuhyun Kwon, Pardha Pyla Poster presented at the 23rd Annual Research Symposium, Virginia Tech, 2007.

Professional Service

• Senior Program Committee: IUI 2015, ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces; Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
• Associate Chair: IUI 2012, the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces; Lisbon, Portugal.
• Technical Program Chairs Assistant: CHI 2011, the ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems; Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
• Co-organizer: PIM 2012 — 5th International Workshop on Personal Information Management; Seattle, Washington, USA.
• Co-organizer: PIM 2009 — 4th International Workshop on Personal Information Management; Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
• Associate Chair: INTERACT 2011, 13th IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction; Lisbon, Portugal.
• Program Committee: World-Wide Web Conference, 2012** for the User Interfaces, Design, and Social Factors track; Lyon, Paris.
• Program Committee: PIM 2008 — the 3rd International Workshop on Personal Information Management, co-hosted with CHI 2008; Florence, Italy.
• Reviewer: CSCW 2012, CHI 2009, CHI 2008, Transactions on Information Systems — Special Issue on Personal Information Management, PIM 2008, INTERACT 2007, IEEE Portable 2007, CHI 2006, DUX 2005.