Community Mentors

Here are the Community Mentors who have been actively involved in the community right from its inception and have volunteered to support the community in specific areas. They have all been motivated by a single objective to share their experience, knowledge and support the student community. Below is an introduction to each of them in their own words.  Please feel free to reach out to them either through the blogs, forums or private message.

Archis Gore

I'm Archis. I studied primarily in Fergusson with a brief six-month stint at ISSC UoP. Was quite big on the open source scene back then, and was an active contributor to a few projects. Then Microsoft came along and worked on Live Mesh for 3 years until the incubation effort was shut down.
My personal specialization is in algorithms and distributed computing. My personal interest is in signal processing, game theory, decision systems, soft computing, and approximate solutions to intractable problems. My official specialization is in incubation and mostly work on V1 products. My practical ability due to experience is cloud computing. I'm somewhat crazy about competitive programming. If you're the sort of person who gets high on ACM ICPC, CodeJam, TopCoder SRMs, etc. ping me. Though I don't get much time anymore to do that kind of thing. I would certainly like to see more colleges from Pune competing at the ACM ICPC which sadly isn't happening.

Tarun Rathor

Hi, I am Tarun Rathor, working with Intuit, Bangalore. Have been with Peepaal since its birth with other fellow contributors. My college education has been in Pune (Fergusson College and PICT) and i love that city. I have worked mostly with product companies like IBM, Peristent, SAS and Intuit(currently). Have a deep expertise with Microsoft technology stack and slowly falling in love with Opensource stack (Hadoop, Cassandra, PIG..). I am really passionate about using upcoming technology like Cloud + Mobile to solve real world problems. For me sharing is a way of gaining. Hence looking forward to contribute and learn with Students and Peers on Peepaal.

Shyamal Pandya 

I am Shyamal  I have been in the software industry for  8+ years. For the past 5+ years I have been primarily working on Backup & Recovery domain with Symantec Corporation. Did my bachelors & Masters in Comp Sc from S.P & Nowrosjee Wadias. Back in college days I was very passionate about doing projects which were out of the box and innovative. It was challenging to execute but end result was always enriching in terms of learning/satisfaction. Have been with Peepaal right since it’s days of inception. Have primarily been a Microsoft fan, off-late have started working on Android and have fallen in love with its simplicity & power. Some of my key interest areas are  cloud, mobile, accelerated computing. As an active member of Peepaal I love to bridge the gap between industry and academics. It’s an extremely satisfying and enriching experience  to share/enhance the knowledge that I have gained over the years. Looking forward to build Peepaal  as a self sustaining community which is  one-stop-shop for all the queries related to the anything in the academic world.

Anoop Kunchukuttan

I am Anoop. I studied at Bharati Vidyapeeth, before doing my masters at IIT Bombay. I am interested in Natural Language Processing and Data Mining. I have previously worked at Persistent Systems on information extraction and text mining applications. If anyone has ideas in these areas, do get in touch with me. I believe Peepaal is a great platform for learning and innovating, with the community and useful projects as the focal point. I have had a great experience working with students, and hope to continue learning and contributing with students and colleagues.

Kaushik Raghupathi

Let me introduce myself as well :-) .. well i am Kaushik Raghupathi and currently work at Persistent Systems. A few of us colleagues from a few different companies started the Peepaal Community a free and open community the primary objective being able to build a community of students and industry professionals allowing us to share knowledge, discuss ideas and generally be able to communicate with each other as an integrated group. We hope this will serve as a platform to serve that purpose both online and offline. My personal areas of interest is in the Databases and BI, have recently taken up a keen interest in Cloud Computing and am very keen to work with students to build interesting Cloud and Mobile Apps.

Vishal Pai

It was one am in the night when Kaushik pointed me to the peepaal site. peepaal the tree of knowledge for people. There were a lot of things we had to learn on our own while we were students and we always felt the need for guidance which never came by :(. I believe that this free and open site has immense potential to get our students to take a giant leap in the IT field. This is Vishal Pai. I have been working in the IT field for past 7 years in multiple roles of developer, technical lead and program manager. Today I am learning the operational aspects of the organization. But programming is the closest to heart. Looking forward to helping students in every way possible and also learning from everyone.What I know well: c/c++, .NET, Google App Engine, Java and I can take up anything and learn it fast.

Nikhil Bhawkar

I am Nikhil Bhawkar, currently working at Persistent Systems.  I studied primarily in Wadia college and completed my M.Sc.(Comp. Sci.) in 2010. Peepaal definitely helped plenty of us in college and gave us the impetus to fall out of the conventional projects and work on the upcoming technologies without fearing failure. And this is helping me even in the industry. :-) I am currently working on Sharepoint 2010 and Windows Azure. Majorly, my interest lies in combining cloud and mobile technologies for solving real life problems, and I’m working on a mobile project as a hobby. I strongly feel that students in college need to get exposure to the industry and the upcoming technologies and Peepaal is doing a great job of doing the same. Once the interest is sparked and the thirst for knowledge is awakened, there's no looking back. I’ll be helping out with whatever I can. Looking forward to learn and share.