Great Women Scientists of India -14: Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan

13. Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan - Business woman

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Born in a typical South Indian family in Bombay Sion, Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan is a woman who has carved out a unique identity in the almost entirely male-dominated IT industry. After graduating from Bombay with an engineering degree, Kamakshi pursued her higher education at Stanford University in the United States, and her aim ?was to become an expert computer programmer, which is the dream of all our youth today. But it is fair to say she ?was ?more than just a programmer and have built a world of her own. The special program she developed for her Ph.D. at Stanford is being used for a meticulous experiment and study on the American space agency NASA's probe to Pluto, the most distant planet in the solar system. With this, she has become a force to be reckoned with in information technology.

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In her ?own words, she was ?not ready to become a programmer like others. It was her ?passion to walk the path no one else walked. What she is doing now is not what she studied in Bombay, researched at Stanford or what Google and Facebook did. In an interview, someone asked her, "Why are you doing this?" Kamakshi said, "No one told me not to do this!" "

The truth is that the field in which Kamakshi worked was generally male-dominated. But she? was ?not interested in being one among the crowd in any company with a big salary. That's why she joined a start-up company called AdMob after her higher studies. They were able to experiment with many new programming methods in a company that was generally full of beginners. The topic they chose was to develop a machine learning stack rather than normal programming. She soon became the leader of the group. The problem was how to make online advertising attractive to individuals. Kamakshi was a pioneer in this. But instead of their natural method, Kamakshi tried some more innovative methods. What they tried was an innovative approach that the giants of information technology, Google and Apple, did not use. Their lack of courage to try new methods, even if they failed at first, also led to the company's success. "When I joined AdMob, Kamakshi was the only woman there.

Kamakshi Ph.D. It was an unexpected success that the research was used in the New Horizon spacecraft to explore Pluto. Seven experiments were intended to be carried out on the spacecraft sent to the outermost planet of the solar system. One of them was called REX. It was an acronym for Radio Science Experiment. The goal was to study the planet's surface by sending a radio signal from the spacecraft to Pluto and measuring the diffraction of the signal on Pluto's surface. Kamakshi made a chip for that. What was needed was to analyze the signal received from a planet three billion miles away. The chip should have used as little electrical power as possible to travel such long distances. They really took it as a challenge. They developed an algorithm for that. In this, they used a design and chip for energy management that effectively transmitted information from that distant planet to Earth.

The ability to undertake such unusual challenges helped them develop a technology of their own. The company they founded for that was called Drawbridge. The company quickly grew to become one of the most important women-owned companies in America. Based in San Mateo, California, the company was developed using artificial intelligence to study how advertising affects people. This is the type of technology that will be used in the Internet of the future. Advertisements are made using the maximum amount of data (Big data) obtained from customers. The fact that this company has grown enviably (23,000 percent) in the last three years alone shows its growth. In 2014, the annual revenue of this techie company was more than 33 million dollars. The mastermind of that success was Kamakshi herself, who was an extraordinary genius. The success in business was due to her ?extraordinary confidence and extraordinary ability to break new ground and move forward. In her ?own words, “The success of a business depends on the millions of small things involved. Thousands look at me with critical eyes every moment as a woman. It was never new to me. I've never had any qualms walking into an all-male business meeting alone or pitching my ideas to them. There will be failures, of course. But if you learn from it and move forward, success is certain if not today or tomorrow.”

Reference

https://yourstory.com/2015/10/kamakshi-sivaramakrishnan

https://mediawiki.feverous.co.uk/index.php/Drawbridge_(company)