Author: Srinath Srinivasa

Ambassador S. Swaminathan is a senior member of the Indian Foreign Service with over three decades of experience, having served in eight countries including Sri Lanka, Belgium, Pakistan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Germany, Brazil, and Iceland. His postings have included roles as Counsellor, Deputy Head of Mission, Minister, Consul General, and Ambassador of India, including India’s first resident Ambassador to Iceland and a tenure as Ambassador to Mongolia. His career has concentrated primarily on relations with India’s neighbours and economic diplomacy. In addition, he has had varied experiences in other areas including political, cultural, press and media relations, education, science and technology, renewable energy, defence, development assistance, HR etc.

Ambassador Swaminathan has worked extensively on bilateral relations with Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Maldives, Afghanistan, and Iran, and has significant experience in the EU, EEA, and ASEAN regions. In Brazil, he served as Deputy Head of Mission in Brasilia and Consul General in Sao Paulo, contributing to the formation of IBSA and facilitating the India-Mercosur Framework Agreement. He has engaged with Heads of State, Cabinet Ministers, business leaders, and academicians, negotiating treaties, agreements, and investment deals, and promoting trade and technology transfers. His strengths include trade policy, investment promotion, technology transfer, renewable energy projects, and project implementation. He has also served as a UN Election Observer in South Africa (1994), participated in G-20 and IBSA ministerial meetings, led humanitarian missions, and overseen embassy and residence construction projects in Berlin, Kuala Lumpur, and Brasilia.

Prof. Inder Gopal is the CEO of the IUDX Program and an Industry Professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). He previously served as Vice President of Software at Ericsson, where he led the launch of their edge computing initiatives. Before that, he was Vice President of Networking at IBM, where he had responsibility for all of IBM’s hardware and software networking products. He has also held senior leadership roles as Chief Architect at AT&T and Chief Technology Officer at Prodigy. An entrepreneur as well, he founded and successfully exited two venture-funded start-ups—ReefEdge and Iptivia—and continues to serve as an investor and board member in several companies.

Prof. Gopal was the Founding Chairman of OpenDaylight, a leading open-source networking software group that brought together dozens of top-tier companies. He has a distinguished research record with 20 patents and over 70 publications, along with two IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards earned during his time at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Centre. He has served as editor for several technical journals, was elected a Fellow of the IEEE, and holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, New York, and a B.A. from Oxford University, England.

Dr. Shalini R. Urs is an internationally recognized academic leader and institution builder with over four decades of experience in higher education. She began her career at the University of Mysore in 1976 and retired in 2016, during which time she founded two pioneering academic institutions — the International School of Information Management (ISiM) at the University of Mysore and the MYRA School of Business in Mysuru.

Her expertise encompasses digital scholarship, digital libraries, ontology development, social network analysis, and the development of digital public infrastructures to advance open science. A pioneer of digital initiatives in India, Dr. Urs spearheaded the Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) movement and established the Vidyanidhi Digital Library and eScholarship Portal, among other landmark projects.

She is a sought-after speaker on topics including digital scholarship, e-Science, open science, and social network analysis, and serves as a consultant to a variety of academic and research initiatives.

Dr. Urs has received numerous honors, including:

• Mortenson Distinguished Lecturer, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2010)
• NDLTD–Adobe Leadership Award (2004)
• Emerald Research Fund Award (2007)
• Fulbright Scholar (2000–2001)

Currently, she hosts InfoFire, a podcast series presented by Information Matters and ASIS&T. This pioneering hybrid format blends biography and scholarship, illuminating the personal, intellectual, and societal forces that shape the evolving information landscape. To date, she has published 27 episodes of the series.

Sakthi Balan is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shiv Nadar University Chennai, Kalavakkam – 603 100. He also serves as an external consultant to the Wadhwani School of AI, IIT Madras. Presently he is doing a collaborative funded project on Domain-Specific LLM with Prof. Ravindran Balaraman (IIT Madras) and his team. He has 7 years of corporate experience prior to his academic career. Sakthi Balan’s research interests lies in the broad areas of Web Science and Data Analytics. In specific, his interests include Social Network Analysis, Bias & Privacy in the Web, LLM and Action Recognition in Sports Videos. Previously, he has worked extensively in the field of Theoretical Computer Science. He has many publications in various International Journals, Conferences and peer-reviewed invited volumes. He has had many academic visits such as: (1) UWO, Canada (2002 and 2004 to 2008) (2) USF, Tampa, USA (2001) (3) EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland (2003), (4) Hungarian Academy of Science, Budapest (2007), (5) RPI, Troy, USA (2017), (6) NUS & NTU Singapore (2023) and so on. He has guided 2 PhD students, 8 MTech students and 70+ BTech students. He has served as TPC member for COLING 2025, ASONAM 2024, ADCOM 2024, ACM WebSci 2024, and WI-IAT 2024. He has served as TPC member in ACM WebSci for the past three years. He has reviewed papers for Conferences such as AAAI ICWSM for the past four years and for LREC-COLING 2024, KDD 2021. Two of his works on Tracking in Indian News Websites presented and published in AAAI ICWSM 2021 and ACM WebSci 2021 has got featured in Open Magazine. More information can be found in https://sakthibalan.in. He can be contacted at sakthibalanm@snuchennai.edu.in.

Prof. Srinivasa heads the Web Science Lab and serves as Dean (R&D) at the International Institute of Information Technology – Bangalore (IIITB), India. He holds a Ph.D. (magna cum laude) from the Berlin Brandenburg Graduate School for Distributed Information Systems (GkVI), Germany, an M.S. (by Research) from the Indian Institute of Technology – Madras (IITM), and a B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from The National Institute of Engineering (NIE), Mysore, India. His research focuses on Web Science, exploring how the World Wide Web affects humanity and how it can enable social empowerment and capability building.

Prof. Srinivasa has contributed to several initiatives in technology-enhanced education, including the Edusat program by Vishveshwaraiah Technological University, NPTEL, the Switzerland-based online MBA program Educatis, and IIITB’s educational outreach with UpGrad. He has served on technical and organizational committees for international conferences such as ICWSM, ACM Hypertext, COMAD/CoDS, ODBASE, BDA, and ACM Web Science. He has also served on Boards of Studies at Goa University and Christ University, as a member of the Academic Council at NIE Mysore, and as a technical reviewer and associate editor for journals including VLDB Journal, ACM Computing Surveys, Springer AI Ethics, IEEE TKDE, IEEE TCC, and Sadhana. He is the recipient of numerous national and international grants and awards from organizations such as EU Horizon 2020, UK Royal Academy of Engineering, Research Councils UK, MeitY, DST, Siemens, Intel, Mphasis, EMC, and Gooru. He has also led the AI initiative for the “Karnataka Data Lake” project by the Planning Department of the Government of Karnataka, promoting data- and evidence-based planning and decision-making.