The Coding Revolutionary

Speaker: Lalitesh Katragadda

Abstract

20th century societal transformations were created by the writing revolutionaries. However, we are far from done. Feudal oppressive choking forces keep all of India from its potential. The next wave of transformations will not be born in the written word, it will be born in code. However code as is today threatens to digitally colonize India, if not all of civilization. A few engineers in Indihood's research lab are dreaming up a new way to code that shifts power from software corporations to India's communities. This conversation will explore and debate this idea.

Bio

Dr. Lalitesh Katragadda is a pioneer in crowdsourcing. His creation, Google Map Maker, quadrupled the world's digital maps corpus, bringing maps to 4 billion in 187 countries that had no maps before. His startup was Google’s first acquisition in 2002 after which he co-founded Google India, acting as Country Head, Google India Products until 2014.

He now builds population scale platforms for India's Billion including Avanti for financial inclusion and Indihood, crowdsourcing for communities and core development challenges. He architected the Fiber Grid for the state of Andhra, the worlds largest greenfield optical network in 2014, authored India’s national Open API policy, is an advisor to MEITY and core contributor to Digitial India and India Stack.

Lalitesh has spoken at TED and The White House.

Lalitesh received his Ph.D. and MS from CMU in Robotics and Computer Science, where he led the CMU Lunar Rover Initiative. He holds an MS, Design Division, Stanford, MS, Aerospace, Iowa State and B-Tech, IIT-Bombay.