durga p pandey

My name is durga pandey and I'm a Technical Marketing Engineer at Clearwell Systems and Co-founder/President at Fast Forward India.

I work in the product management group at Clearwell where my work is a mix of product design, programming, sales support, and technical documentation. The most important things I have learnt at Clearwell are "getting things done" and understanding the customer perspective. Clearwell is a great company, with the most amazing people and company culture.

I earned an MS in the Viral Communications group at the MIT Media Lab, where I was also a Samsung fellow. My research was focussed on decentralized, viral architectures. In my Masters thesis, I describe Uniplug, an architecture for diffusing software inventions on a campus network. I also worked on an ad-hoc wireless conferencing system called FluidVoice. The fundamental motivation behind FluidVoice is to exploit the shared nature of radio and utilize it as an asset rather than a bug. As an undergraduate, I worked on a cognitive approach to congestion control in Delay Tolerant Networks and presented a cognition based multilevel congestion likelihood detector in my dissertation.

I was a Reuters Digital Vision fellow at Stanford University for the 2004-05 academic year. Stanford was a transformational experience, where I met innumerable thinkers turned social doers. In 2006, I teamed up with college friends Jitendra Mohan and Shulabh Gupta and started Fast Forward India, a non-profit that helps college students in India launch non-profit startups. FFI has been a success in Dhanbad, and is being scaled to other parts of India.

Current research interests:

Innovative solutions to developing countries' problems.
Systems and networking, Communications, Math, Theoretical CS.
Building great products.

In my spare time, I usually read, run, hike, watch movies, and explore new websites. I follow a bunch of tweeters on my iPhone. I have a special love for works by coetzee, steinbeck, vikram seth, calvino and hemingway. I read the New Yorker and HBR as often as I find time. I'm very partial to hikes with grand views. So I'm obviously not the 'damp n shaded jungle' hiker. I engage in the occasional dance.

I live in the utterly gorgeous San Francisco bay area.