Category Archives: News

News and updates on sneaker.org

Rajeev Motwani: A pillar of Stanford CS & Silicon Valley

(Note: This post was originally posted on the K9 Ventures blog. I am cross-posting it here.)

Rajeev Motwani
Rajeev Motwani

I was in complete disbelief when I read the first tweet yesterday evening that Stanford Computer Science professor Rajeev Motwani had passed away. I was still incredulous and hoping that it was untrue until the sad news was verified in a email sent to the department. Even now as I write this with Rajeev’s picture on my screen, it’s still hard to believe.

In March of this year Rajeev agreed to be an advisor to K9 Ventures. I was very excited to have Rajeev on board as an advisor for K9 and as a personal mentor. His untimely passing is a shock that will reverberate through Stanford and the Valley.

My introduction to Rajeev began as a student in the PhD program at Stanford CS. Rajeev was the head of the PhD program when I joined, and he was the defacto advisor to all incoming students until they found their own advisor. He was responsible for making sure that every student find a new home within the department in a timely manner. I can still remember Rajeev’s advice to all the students — that your only job in the first quarter is to find an advisor. And to not worry about requirements like Comprehensive Exams and Qualifying Exams and focus on the research. His mandate to us was that a PhD should make an incremental contribution to human knowledge. That phrase stuck in the back of my head throughout my PhD work and proved to be a good filter to test potential thesis topics.

Even Rajeev didn’t know that in my first few interactions with him, I felt quite intimidated. Intimidated because of the immense respect I had for his intellect, his ability and his judgment. Even though my research interest was in the field of Human Computer Interaction, since my advisor (Terry Winograd) was on sabbatical at Google for the first year that I was at Stanford, I was fortunate to interact with Rajeev a little while longer than I otherwise would have.

When I decided that I wanted to enter the field of Venture Capital, Rajeev was one of the first people I contacted. He was instrumental in opening several doors for me and made valuable introductions to other VCs and firms on Sand Hill Road — leading to several valued relationships. As just one datapoint, it was through Rajeev’s introduction that Refocus Imaging obtained its funding.

Rajeev truly was a pillar of Stanford Computer Science and of Silicon Valley. He touched and helped so many people — as students, advisees, entrepreneurs, colleagues and friends. He directly or indirectly contributed to the formation and the success of numerous startups (Google being the most notable, but there are many, many more). I am incredibly thankful to Rajeev for this advice, his mentorship, and the role that he played in guiding me in choosing my path not only as a student, but for life.

I feel truly fortunate to have interacted with and learnt from Prof Motwani. At the same time, I am deeply saddened at his sudden and untimely passing. I sincerely wish Rajeev’s family all the best in this difficult time and beyond.

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Blogging 2.009

I have had a rocky relationship with blogging over the years. There have been times when I have been blogging actively and others when I have taken down the site altogether. Thinking back, I launched my personal website back in 1996. The original site was at sneaker.pc.cs.cmu.edu and then moved to www.sneaker.org when I got my own domain. Back then I used to have a section I referred to internally asĀ  ‘Sneaker’s Log,’ on the front page where I posted periodic news and updates. Looking back at it now, I guess that could be considered my first blog, except that was well before blogging as a term ever became popular.

I stopped writing here a while ago, and only had a few sporadic posts over the years. However, I’ve still been actively reading various blogs and sharing posts on my Shared Items on Google Reader and as of late also been more active on Twitter (@manukumar).

For 2009, I hope to make a return to blogging more often and resurrect this site. I won’t make any promises, and I don’t really do resolutions, but here’s looking forward to post more often in 2009. Happy New Year!

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Slashdotted…

Looks like some of my work got slashdotted and people are coming to this side after searching for my name on the web. This is my personal site, which has been more or less dormant for a while (as you can probably tell from the dated posts). The real website you want to go to to find out more about my research is the GUIDe project on the Stanford HCI website.

You will find the links to the EyePassword paper, the EyePoint video, the soon-to-be-published Gaze-based Scrolling Techniques paper and lots of other work in the publications section of the site.

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GUIDe: Gaze-enhanced User Interface design

For my doctoral work at Stanford I am working on developing ways to use eye-gaze to interact with computing devices. The project called GUIDe (Gaze-enhanced User Interface Design) allows you to do everyday actions of interacting with a computer using eye-gaze. You can surf the web without having to use a mouse, switch applications by simply looking at them in an expose-like view etc. For more information check out the GUIDe website.

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Dynamic Speedometer

I haven’t really been updating my personal site at all, but here is a link to some of the work I did at Stanford which was published at CHI 2005. The basic premise is that cars should be equipped with a dynamic speedometer which shows the current speedlimit on the background of the display. The technology to do this already exists today. This is just one of several approaches we developed in order to combat the issue of un-intentional speeding.

Dynamic Speedometer website is on the Stanford HCI Group page.

Here is a video clip which shows the dynamic speedometer in action.

In addition, here is a podcast which featured the Dynamic Speedometer research.

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