Speakers

Navakanta Bhat received his B.E. in Electronics and Communication from University of Mysore in 1989, M.Tech. in Microelectronics from I.I.T. Bombay in 1992 and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, California in 1996. Then he worked at Motorola’s Networking and Computing Systems Group under Advanced Products R&D Lab (APRDL) in Austin, Texas until 1999. He joined the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 1999 where he is currently the Dean of Division of Interdisciplinary Sciences and Professor at the Centre for Nano Science and Engineering (CeNSE). His current research is focused on Nanoelectronics device technology, Biosensors for point of care diagnostics and Gas sensors for pollution monitoring. He has more than 300 research publications in international journals and conferences and more than 50 international patents. He was instrumental in creating the National Nanofabrication Centre (NNfC) at IISc, Bangalore. He has served as the Chair of NNfC administration committee (2010 – 2015) and Chair of CeNSE (2016-2020). He is an elected Fellow of IEEE, Indian National Academy of Engineering and all 3 Science academies in India. He received Swarnajayanti fellowship (2005) from the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India, Prof. Satish Dhavan award (2005) from the Govt. of Karnataka, IBM Faculty award 2007, Outstanding Research Investigator award (2010) from Department of Atomic Energy. For his translational research work, he has received Dr. Abdul Kalam Technology Innovation National Fellowship (2018), Prof. Rustum Choksi award for Excellence in Engineering Research (2017), Nina Saxena Technology Excellence award (2018), NASI Reliance Industries Platinum Jubilee award (2018) and BIRAC Innovator award (2018). He has also received prestigious Infosys Prize (2018) in Engineering and Computer Science, Distinguished Alumnus award IIT Bombay (2022) and Yashraj Bharati Samman for Innovation in Healthcare (2022). He was the member of the Board of Governors (2016-2021) IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS), the Vice President (2020-2023) Educational Activities, IEEE EDS and the Chair of IEEE EDS Nanotechnology technical committee (2017-2019). He was the Editor of IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, (2013-2015), and the chief-editor of the IEEE special issue on “2D Materials for Electronic, Optoelectronic and Sensors”. He was also a member of committee for Semiconductors, of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). He is a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Electron Devices Society. He was the Chair of the Human Resource Development and Infrastructure committee of the National Program on Micro and Smart Systems. He was the member of the committee set up by the Principal Scientific Advisor to Govt. of India to recommend strategies to develop semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem in India. He is currently the Chair of Vision Group on Nano Technology (VGNT) of Government of Karnataka. He is the co-founder and promoter of a startup company, PathShodh Healthcare Pvt. Ltd. (www.pathshodh.com). Based on his group’s research in biosensors, PathShodh has developed the first of its kind multi-analyte point-of-care diagnostic device for multiple chronic diseases including diabetes and its complications, anemia and malnutrition, kidney and liver diseases and COVID-19 antibodies. For this technology, PathShodh has received multiple recognitions: Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) Industrial Innovation Award 2017, for the most promising start-up and CII Grand Jury Award for Innovation, 2017; Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) Healthcare Excellence award, 2017 for the best start-up of the year; Design Impact award for Social change by Titan. These products are now used in 17 states in India, for Glucose, Hemoglobin and HbA1c testing in rural health screening, clinics and many hospitals.

Sudarshan Shenvi is the Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Blute Technologies Pvt. Ltd., a Bengaluru-based engineering firm that delivers production-grade software for enterprise clients. He brings more than two decades of experience turning complex engineering problems into systems that hold up under real-world load. His current work centers on real-time distributed computing. He leads engineering for a programmatic advertising exchange that handles very high request volumes at sub-100-millisecond latency across multi-region, multi-cloud infrastructure, built on technologies such as Apache Kafka, ClickHouse, Apache Flink, and Kubernetes. Alongside this, he drives the adoption of production AI and multi-agent systems — taking large language models beyond demonstrations into governed, evaluated, cost-disciplined production workflows. Before founding Blute, Sudarshan spent eleven years as CTO of Pervazive Inc., architecting machine learning and big- data platforms for telecom and utility clients — experience that shaped his view of what enterprise-grade engineering genuinely demands. A graduate of Bangalore Institute of Technology, he writes and speaks on software delivery, enterprise architecture, and the practical realities of AI tooling — what’s hype and what actually ships.