| Prasad Bhaarat Ram | |
|---|---|
| Born | Tiptur, Karnataka, India |
| Occupation | CEO, Ednovo |
Dr. Prasad Bhaarat Ram, Ph.D, is the founder and CEO of Ednovo,[1] a non-profit education technology startup in Palo Alto, California. Ednovo's mission is to honor the human right to education by making high quality educational resources accessible and free to the world's one billion students.
Dr. Ram previously worked at Xerox PARC, Dynamx Technology (co-founder), Yahoo! and Google. He has led the creation of a number of technologies, such as digital rights management, maps, voice recognition and language transliteration.
Contents |
Prasad Ram, known as Pram, was born in Tiptur of Karnataka state in southern India. He obtained his B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 1987. He then went on to pursue his Masters' degree (M.S) and Ph.D. in Computer Science, from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Dr. Ram started his career at Xerox PARC, where he worked on Digital Rights Management technology. He was recognized for his work with the Excellence in Research Award. Based on the DRM technologies he developed and patented, he created and became the General Manager of ContentGuard[2] business at Xerox. He spent a few years founding Dynamx Technology, Inc., a startup that was acquired by Value Chain Pty. Ltd. Ram joined Yahoo!, as a chief technology officer of Yahoo! India in April 2004.[3] He led the creation of products (Yahoo! Audio/Image search, Yahoo! 360, and Yahoo! Hotjobs) and platforms (Spam Filtering, Behavioral Targeting, Mobile Data Analysis, Vertical Search, Content Management). He joined Google as the head and site director at Google's India research and development centre in Bangalore in October 2006.[4] In 2007, he introduced many products and technologies, including Mapmaker,[5] News,[6] Finance[7] and Transliteration.[8] He then moved back to the U.S., where he worked on Google Books and Google Research as Director of Research at Google.
Ram organized and led a parent volunteer movement and founded the PSBB Academy, a K-12 school in Bangalore. It commenced operations in 2006. Ram is on the Governing Board of the International School of Information Management (ISiM), at the University of Mysore, Mysore, India.[9] In 2011, Ram founded Ednovo[10] with the vision of providing the world's one billion students with access to Gooru within three years.
Gooru is a free online education tool that connects students with standards-aligned, teacher-curated learning resources.[11] Gooru was launched in June 2011 by the non-profit organization Ednovo. The alpha version of Gooru is currently available by invitation. Over 1,000 students and teachers around the world are collaborating with Ram and his team to develop Gooru.