First batch alumni, Sujit Kuthirummal and Rupa Krishnan visited IIITH and interacted with students on 2 January. 

Sujit Kuthirummal is a software engineer at Waymo, whose mission is to bring the benefits of self driving to services that safely move people and things. After his B.Tech in Computer Science and M.S by Research from IIITH, he obtained his Ph.D in Computer Science from Columbia University. He then worked at SRI-Sarnoff on projects for the US military. After a few years of that he moved to Google where he worked on Ads for approximately 4 years learning about the Ads ecosystem, distributed systems, and in general running things at scale. He has been at Waymo for the past 4 years where he has worked on Perception and most recently on System Evaluation Infrastructure.

Rupa Krishnan is a software engineer at Google. After graduating from IIITH, she did her Master’s in Computer Science from University of Georgia and a Ph.D from Stonybrook university. She started as an intern at Google in 2007 and has been there since. She has worked on building scalable, robust, and reliable infrastructure at Google. She currently works on Google Cloud where her team provides quota management infrastructure.

Both Sujit and Rupa spoke about the challenges they faced in the past being one of the early batches, the problems that were back then, and a lot about requirements and expectations in industry vs research. Unfurling their experience, they emphasized on the commitment and hard work required for Ph.D. Since, Rupa was working alongside pursuing a Ph.D, she had a tough time coping up with both, but in the end it was all worth it. Their experience suggests research guide is the one who will be your lighthouse, guiding you while you are sailing and lost in the vast area of research. Guide selection is also a hard nut to crack while starting any research career. Talking about industry, they commented on interviews and learning curves upon joining a early-startup, mid-level and well-established multinational. The session was interspersed with informal questions to lighten up the mood. IIITH community, had a pleasant time talking to them and it was indeed a very constructive session. 

Speaking about their visit, Prof P J Narayanan said, “It’s great to have alumni who are doing really cool things to come back and enlighten the present research students and non-research students”.