PEOPLE

Anand Kannan, Managing Director

Anand Kannan (anand.kannan@vepl.com) was born in Kumbakonam, India. He obtained his B.Tech degree from IIT, Madras, India, MSc(Engg) degree from IISc, Bangalore, India and PhD from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA. Subsequently he worked in Nokia as part of its Research Center in Irving, Texas for several years as Research Engineer and then as Manager, New Business Development. He also did a short stint at Arraycomm, Inc in San Jose California during its startup days.  During his tenure in Nokia he was involved in several projects in Wireless LAN research, GSM and CDMA radio technology, entry level mobile application development and business model development for low income markets. His interests lie in communication technology, system development, digital signal processing, algorithm and architecture development, economics, entrepreneurship andmanagement.

Yogish Lavanis (Director and Vice-President(R&D))

Yogish Lavanis (yogish.lavanis@vepl.com) was born in Goa, India. He obtained his B.Tech degree from IT-BHU, Varanasi, India and MSc(Engg) degree from IISc, Bangalore, India. Subsequently he worked in companies such as Tata-Elxsi and C-DoT as Research Engineer. He was with Motorola for a long period of time in  protocol engineering, architecture and design for GSM, UMTS, WAP technologies in senior technical and project management roles. During his tenure in Motorola he received the Chairman of the Board's challenge award . He has guided and mentored several deeply technical teams towards challenging goals. His interests are in mobile and cellular communication technologies, system engineering, mobile applications for productive and positive usage for the Indian Market. He also has a deep interest in the visual arts - photography, painting, architecture and sculpture.

Valued Epistemics consists of a small team of passionate technologists, content developers, subject experts and administrative staff.

Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthy, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Dean (Planning) at IIT, Madras serves on the Board of Directors and as a strategic and technical advisor. Bhaskar Ramamurthi (bhaskar@tenet.res.in) got his B.Tech in Electronics from IIT Madras in 1980, and his M.S. and Ph.D is Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara, in 1982 and 1985 respectively. After working at AT&T Bell Laboratories for a couple of years, he joined the faculty of IIT Madras in 1986, where he is currently Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department, and Dean of Planning for the Institute. His areas of specialisation are Communications and Signal Processing. His research work is in Wireless Networks, Modulation, Wireless Data, and Audio and Video Compression. He is a founding member of the TeNeT group of IIT Madras, active in developing telecom and networking technologies, and incubating companies to develop and market products based on these. He has been closely involved in the design of the corDECT Wireless Access System, and the next-generation Broadband corDECT System. He is currently also honorary Director of the Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology, a public-private initiative to make India a wireless technology leader.

He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering. He was awarded the Vasvik Award for Electronic Sciences and Technology for the year 2000, and the Tamil Nadu Scientist Award for Engineering and Technology for the year2003.