Vipul Ved Prakash (born 1977) is a software engineer and entrepreneur, most widely known for creating Vipul's Razor, a collaborative anti-spam system. In 2001, Vipul co-founded[1] Cloudmark, a company that builds email security software for consumers, enterprises and ISPs based on the collaborative filtration technology of Vipul's Razor.
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Vipul grew up in New Delhi, India. A determined autodidact, he spent most of his teenage years outside classrooms, writing computer programs and playing competitive Table Tennis. At the age of 13, he won the junior state championship and played on the national Table Tennis circuit until he graduated from high school. Vipul attended St. Stephen's College, Delhi for undergraduate studies in Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science, but eventually dropped out[2] to pursue his interests in software design. In the late-90s, Vipul co-founded, with Ashish Gulhati, an Internet privacy company (Sense/Net) for early Internet users in India and wrote extensively for computer magazines and industry journals,[3] including a regular column, Net Zeppelin, on networking protocols for the Indian edition of the PC World Magazine. In 2003, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.[4]
Vipul is an ardent supporter of the free software movement and has published a lot of his work under Open Source licenses. He has written several popular extensions to the Perl programming language, that include Crypt::RSA, Crypt::Primes and Net::XWhois. Vipul has a strong interest in cryptography and considers himself a cypherpunk. He implemented the RSA cryptosystem in an export-friendly form factor as Perl code in the shape of a dolphin. More recently, he published a design for an electronic voting system dubbed Athens that uses cryptographic methods to provide proofs of correctness.
In May, 2000, Vipul and Rishab A. Ghosh, published the Orbiten Free Software Survey,[5] which is considered to be the first successful attempt at building a comprehensive empirical model of contribution to Open Source projects. The software and methodologies developed for the survey are now widely used in Open Source research.