The computing genius

Ninety nine per cent of human beings are content to use the wheel. But one per cent of humans are not content with the wheel being the wheel. These are the people who take the world forward. These are the people who will one day get us jet packs and Mars travel. Mahadev Satyanarayanan is among those one per cent. 'Satya' as he likes to be called is an experimental computer scientist who works as a faculty member in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Satya has Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the IIT, Madras and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon. To put his work in his own simple words, Satya designs, implements and evaluates systems in mobile computing, pervasive computing and distributed systems. While he is co-inventor of many mobile computing technologies like cyber foraging, and Internet Suspend/Resume, Satya’s most famous work to date has been in the development of his Coda File system, which has been used by Microsoft in its software products like Windows and Outlook. He is also the principal architect of the Andrew File System which has been commercialised by IBM and is in widespread use today with the name OpenAFS. Satya is also the founding Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine, one of the respected magazines in the pervasive and ubiquitous computing field.