Technology

VENU VASUDEVAN
Senior Director, Software Platforms Research

---

As Senior Director for software Platforms Research at the Motorola Applied Research Center, Venu Vasudevan leads research efforts on media delivery architectures for advancing television and mobile platforms with specific emphasis on social media platforms, novel advertising experiences and mobile interactive entertainment. With more than fifteen years of architecture and strategy experience in telecommunications and enterprise, Vasudevan enables compelling media experiences for consumers, while making Motorola technology the platform of choice for media application developers.

Vasudevan's specific research areas include platforms and applications that leverage distributed computing to create new media and entertainment technologies. Currently, Vasudevan is working on a project regarding the "set-top of the future", focused on enhancing the services architecture of the set-top to enable interactive media services based on combining traditional TV, Web 2.0 and social networking. Application areas include social search, social media sharing (e.g., TV clip sharing) and targeted advertising.

Another area of particular interest is Motorola's smart cart platform to support richer graphics and social networking for online shopping. As e-commerce becomes even more commonly embraced by consumers, retailers are looking at technological advances to help legitimize online channels and maintain brand loyalty by meeting customers' expectations of what online experiences should be. The smart cart project Vasudevan spearheads is aimed at augmenting the brick-and-mortar shopping experience with a rich digital experience.

Vasudevan joined Motorola in 1999, and has also served as director of the pervasive platforms lab in addition to other roles. His work led to Motorola's Liquid Media convergence technology and subsequent "follow me" media innovations showcased at CES, CTIA and other venues.

Building a career at the cross-section of youth and fun has enabled Vasudevan to see his research through to reality and keeps him passionate about his work. Youth serves as the demographic steering the direction of new media services, and he enjoys working on systems that cater to the demands of interactive entertainment. Vasudevan finds Motorola a great fit with the company actively participating in numerous markets being transformed by the digitization of content and convergence of content and communication.

Well-respected within the larger mobile industry, Vasudevan has served as a speaker and panelist at industry events such as Yankee Group, Digital Hollywood and the Pelorus Group summits. He has also written award-winning papers that have received recognition from the Hawaii International Conference, the ACM Convergence on Small and Personal Computers, and more recently for his work on gestural remote controls, which won the best paper award at IEEE Percom 2009.

Vasudevan has three issued patents in the areas of computer-aided design databases and multimedia architectures and has published more than 30 conference and journal publications on topics relating to distributed computing, peer-to-peer and sensor computing systems as well as rich media platforms.

Graduating with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Ohio State University and the Indian Institute of Technology with a Bachelor's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Vasudevan also currently serves as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Rice University's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

---

Selected Publications and Invited Papers

"Mobile 2.0 : Beyond Mobilizing Web-Based Social Networks," UCLA WiNMEC Forum on Mobile Web 2.0.

"Interstitial Ambient Interfaces for Mobile Devices," Workshop on Designing Ambient Information Systems, IEEE Conference on Pervasive Computing, 2007.

"Global Software Entrepreneurship." IEEE COMPSAC Panel on Software Engineering Education in a Globally Competitive Environment, 2006.

"Ensembleware: Contextual Service Provisioning in a Ubiquitous Services World," Invited talk at IEEE Symposium on Advanced Internet Technologies, 2004.

Related downloads

"Collaborative Mobile Gaming: Enabling Socially Interactive, Participatory, Media-Rich Gaming Experiences" (6 page PDF, 213 KB)