Asoke K. Talukder has been with the IT industry for about 25 years. He has held senior positions in different technology companies in India and abroad. In his last industry association, he was the founder-CTO of Cellnext, the pioneering wireless technology company in India offering technology and solutions in the domain of GSM, GPRS, SMS, MMS, Intelligent Networks, CDMA, and 3G. Since January 2003, he has been with the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore and is currently the DaimlerChrysler Chair and Associate Professor at IIITB. Asoke has worked in the USA, UK, Singapore, and India for companies like Microsoft, Oracle, Informix, Sequoia, NEC, Fujitsu-ICIM, Digital, iGate, Blue Star Infotech, ICL to name a few. A postgraduate in Physics from the University of Calcutta (1976), he set up the first X.25 network in India for the Department of Telecommunications way back in 1986. Later, he set up the first Java Centre in India in 1998. He was a key engineer for Oracle Parallel Server for Hewlett-Packard HP-FX fault tolerant computers as well as for the 64 bit Informix for DEC Alpha.
He is a recipient of many international awards for innovations and professional excellence including the ICIM Professional Excellence Award, ICL Services Trophy, ICL Chief Executive Excellence award, Atlas Club Excellence Award, etc. One of his ubiquitous middleware products was awarded the IBM Solutions Excellence Award in 2001; one other product on Java Card security was recipient of an award at the GSM World Congress in 2003.
Roopa R. Yavagal completed her B.E. Computer Science from Basaveshwar Engineering College, Bagalkot, Karnataka in 1998. After her graduation, she joined the technical team at Cellnext and developed applications for cellular companies in India in the technology domain of GSM, GPRS, and CDMA. She did her M Tech from the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIITB) in 2001. Her areas of interest include wireless application and service creation in wireless domain. She is currently working with Symphony Services, Bangalore.