Personal Website | Deva P Seetharam

Name: Deva P. Seetharam

Profile: Inventor, Entrepreneur and Technology Advisor

Summary

An accomplished leader with deep technical skills for designing innovative solutions and soft skills for commercializing those innovations.
Co-founded and led 2 successful technology startups and a successful research group for IBM Research India. Have been granted 21 US patents and have published more than 50 papers in top academic venues.
Have client and business development experience in USA, Australia, Europe and India.

About me

I am a MIT Graduate with a strong systems background. I have experience in a diverse set of areas from energy management to pervasive media to embedded networking technologies to distributed systems.

I recently co-founded DataGlen, a company focussed on collecting and curating IoT Data. I serve as one of the General Chairs for ACM e-Energy 2015 a conference that aims to be premier venue for research in computing and communication for smart energy systems.

I founded Smarter Energy Research for IBM India in 2008. Our work has been well recognised with awards like 2014 MIT TR35, 2013 Indian National Academy Young Engineer and others.

Whatever (the little) I have accomplished is only because I have been fortunate to have a great family, teachers, mentors and colleagues.

Thank you for stopping by!!!

Startups

In 2015, I co-founded, DataGlen, with Rajesh Kunnath, Sunil Ghai and Tanuja Ganu, in Bengaluru. We started with the objective of developing a data market place (think of it as an eBay for timeseries data). However, given the difficulties of convincing organisations to share their gold, we pivoted to developing machine learning and IoT technologies for managing Distributed Energy Resources such as solar and storage. We developed both edge and cloud side solutions including phone apps for iOS and Android.

The company’s revenue grew by at least 225% year-on-year from 2015 to 2019. DataGlen has many B2B customers (DISCOMs, OEMs, Solar EPCs and O&Ms) in Australia, New Zealand, Portugal, Kenya, Sri Lanka and India. The company’s products and business models have been recognized with the many prestigious awards and honors.

In March 2019, NASSCOM, the apex body for the 154 billion dollar Indian IT BPM industry, selected us as one of the winners of NASSCOM’s AI for Good awards.
In December 2018, Amazon selected DataGlen as the best AI company in the analytics category.
In July 2018, the best project award for our edge analytics work from Microsoft Research.
In April 2017, selected as one of the 12 most innovative energy startups in the world by Free Electrons, an energy accelerator program run by 8 global utilities.
In August 2017, Cisco Launchpad Interstellar award.
In January 2018, the best startup award from the India Energy Storage Alliance.
In December 2018, Yes Bank selected DataGlen as one of the 6 startups for 2018 cleantech cohort.
In August 2017, selected by Karnataka State Government as one of the 100 best startups in Karnataka.
In February 2019, Government of India selected DataGlen as one of the startups to be featured on Agnii innovation showcase.
In September 2017, YourStory selected us as one of the 30 best startups.

In 2006, I co-founded, RadioSherpa, with Sasha Javid, in Boston. Our idea was to offer an electronic programming guide for terrestrial radio stations in the USA. We developed one of the first (in 2006) cloud-edge hybrid solution which aggregated metadata such as song/program titles from HD Radio broadcasts and presented them in real time on a website. The edge solution collected program data directly from tuners deployed in different parts of the country. Below is a screen cap of what the display looked like. Our tiled display predated similar displays now prevalent on iPad sites (we developed this in 2006), and even Netflix.

Leveraging our web service, we developed new apps for platforms like Apple Dashboard. Here is a screenshot of one of our apps.

We deployed our solution in Boston, New York and San Francisco. In 2008, we sold our company to Google-ventures and Sequoia-backed RadioTime, which today operates under the name of TuneIn. Bill Moore and his team at TuneIn have done a remarkable job, particularly in mobile. Currently TuneIn has more than 40 million monthly active listeners.

Publications & Patents

Deva has been granted 21 US patents and has co-authored and published 50+ papers in top research venues such as Springer-Nature, IEEE JSAC, IEEE IPDPS, ACM e-Energy, ACM CHI, ACM UBICOMP, ACM Buildsys, etc. As per Google Scholar, his works have received 1900+ citations with a h-index of 24. Three of his papers (published at ACM e-Energy 2014, ACM Buildsys 2014 and IEEE COMSNETS E6 2012) have been recognized with best paper awards.

V. Chandan, M. Jain, H. Khadilkar, Z. Charbiwala, A. Jain, S. Ghai, R. Kunnath and D.P. Seetharam. UrJar: A Device to Address Energy Povery using E-Waste - ACM e-Energy, July 2015.

V. Chandan, M. Jain, H. Khadilkar, Z. Charbiwala, A. Jain, S. Ghai, R. Kunnath and D.P. Seetharam. UrJar: A Lighting Solution using Discarded Laptop Batteries - ACM Dev, December 2014.
M. Jain, H. Khadilkar, N. Sengupta, Z. Charbiwala, K.U. Tennakoon, R. Wahab, L. Silva and D.P. Seetharam. Collaborative Energy Conservation in a Microgrid, ACM Buildsys, Memphis, USA, November 2014
H. Khadilkar, V. Chandan, S. Kalra, S. Ghai, Z. Charbiwala, T. Ganu, R. Kunnath, L.C. Ming and D.P. Seetharam. DC Picogrids as Power Backups for Office Buildings, IEEE SmartGridComm, November 2014.
T. Wijaya, T. Ganu, D. Chakraborty, K. Aberer and D.P. Seetharam. Consumer segmentation and knowledge extraction from smart meter and survey data. SIAM SDM, October 2014.
H. Khadilkar, T. Ganu, Z. Charbiwala, C.M. Lim, S. Mathew, D.P. Seetharam. Algorithms for upgrading the resolution of aggregate energy meter data, ACM e-Energy, June 2014. (Best Paper Award)
V. Chandan, T. Ganu, T. K. Wijaya, M. Minou, G.D. Stamoulis, G.A. Thanos, D.P. Seetharam. iDR: Consumer and grid friendly demand response system, ACM e-Energy, June 2014.
T. Ganu, D. Rahayu, D.P. Seetharam, R. Kunnath, A.P. Kumar, V. Arya, S.A. Husain, S. Kalyanaraman. SocketWatch: An autonomous appliance monitoring system, IEEE Percom, April 2014.
C. Basu, A. Agrawal, J. Hazra, A.P. Kumar, D.P. Seetharam, J. Beland, S. Guillon, I. Kamwa, C. Lafond. Understanding events for wide-area situational awareness, ISGT North America, January 2014.

C. Basu, J. Hazra, K. Das and D.P. Seetharam. Real-time Alarm Management System for Wide-Area Monitoring. IEEE ISGT Asia, November 2013.
C. Basu, K. Das, J. Hazra, and D.P. Seetharam. Enhancing Wide-Area Monitoring and Control with Intelligent Alarm Handling. IEEE ISGT Europe, October 2013.
D.P Seetharam, V. Arya, D. Chakraborty, Z. Charbiwala, T. Ganu, S. Ghai, J. Hazra, P. Kodeswaran, R. Mitra, B. Narayanaswamy and N. Sengupta. Cyber Physical Systems for Smarter Energy Grids: Experiences at IBM Research-India. Journal of the Indian Institute of Science 93(3), 541--552, September 2013.
J. Hazra, S. Roy, Z. Charbiwala, D.P. Seetharam, Y. Sabharwal, S. Husain and S. Mathew. Energy Delivery Networks. IEEE SmartGridComm, November 2013.
J. Hazra, K. Das, A. P. Kumar, B. Narayanaswamy and D.P. Seetharam. Optimal Utilization of Power Transformers Through Virtual Sensing. IEEE ISGT Europe 2013.
M. Jain, A. Agrawal, K. Truong and D.P. Seetharam. We are not in the loop: Resource Wastage and Conservation Attitude of Employees in Indian Workplace, ACM UBICOMP, September 2013.
T. Ganu, D.P. Seetharam, D. Sinha, V. Arya, R. Kunnath, J. Hazra, S.A. Husain, L. Silva, S. Kalyanaraman. nPlug: An Autonomous Peak Load Controller, IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communication (JSAC). July 2013.
D.P. Seetharam, A. Agrawal, T. Ganu, J. Hazra, V. Rajaraman and R. Kunnath. Hidden costs of power cuts and battery backups, ACM e-Energy, May 2013.
S.K. Ghai, Z. Charbiwala, R. Kunnath, S. Mylavarapu and D.P. Seetharam. DC Picogrids: A Case for Local Energy Storage for Uninterrupted Power to DC Appliances, ACM e-Energy, May 2013. (Best Paper Finalist)
Y. B. Shrinivasan, Mohit Jain, D.P. Seetharam, A. Choudhary, E.M. Huang, T. Dillahunt and J. Mankoff. Deep Conservation in Urban India and its Implications for the Design of Conservation Technologies, ACM CHI, May 2013.

K. Kumar, M. Radhakrishnan, K. Sivalingam and D.P. Seetharam, M Karthick. Comparison of Publish-Subscribe Network Architectures for Smart Grid Wide Area Monitoring. IEEE SmartGridComm, November 2012.
N. Sengupta, K. Das, T.S. Jayram and D.P. Seetharam. Optimal Allocation of Land Area for a Hybrid Solar Wind Farm, IEEE SmartGridComm, November 2012.
J. Hazra, K. Das and D.P. Seetharam. Smart Grid Congestion Management through Demand Response. IEEE SmartGridComm, November 2012.
K. Das, J. Hazra, D.P. Seetharam, R.K. Reddi and A. K. Sinha. Real-time Hybrid State Estimation Incorporating SCADA and PMU Measurements, IEEE ISGT, October 2012.
R.K. Reddi, J. Hazra, K. Das, D.P. Seetharam, and A. K. Sinha. Power Grid Transient Stability Prediction Using Wide Area Synchrophasor Measurements, IEEE ISGT, October 2012.
D.P. Seetharam, T. Ganu and J. Basak. Sepia : A Self-Organizing Electricity Pricing System. IEEE PES ISGT Asia, November 2012.
T. Ganu, D.P. Seetharam, V. Arya, R. Kunnath, J. Hazra, S.A. Husain, L. Silva and S. Kalyanaraman. nPlug: A Smart Plug for Alleviating Peak Loads, ACM e-Energy, May 2012.
D. Rahayu, B. Narayanaswamy, S. Krishnaswamy, C. Labbé and D.P. Seetharam. Learning to Be Energy-Wise: Discriminative Methods for Load Disaggregation, ACM e-Energy, May 2012.
S.K Ghai, L.V Thanayankizil, D.P. Seetharam and D. Chakraborty. Occupancy Detection in Commercial Buildings using Opportunistic Context Sources. Work in Progress. IEEE Percom 2012.
L.V Thanayankizil, S.K Ghai, D. Chakraborty and D.P. Seetharam. Softgreen : Towards Energy Management of Green Office Buildings with Soft Sensors. IEEE COMSNETS E6, January 2012. (Best Paper Award)

V. Arya, D.P. Seetharam, S. Kalyanaraman, K. Dontas, C. Pavlovski, S. Hoy and J. Kalagnanam. Phase Identification in Smart Grids. IEEE SmartGridComm 2011.
A. Mittal, J. Hazra, N. Jain, V. Goyal, D.P. Seetharam and Y. Sabharwal. Real Time Contingency Analysis for Power Grids, Europar 2011.
J. Hazra, K. Das, and D.P. Seetharam and A. Singhee, Stream computing based synchrophasor application for power grids, 1st International Workshop on High Performance Computing, Networking and Analytics for the Power Grid (ACM), 2011.
T. Bapat, N. Sengupta, S.K. Ghai, V. Arya, Y. Shrinivasan and D.P. Seetharam. User-sensitive Scheduling of Home Appliances. ACM SIGCOMM Green Networking Workshop 2011.
V. Arya, J. Hazra, P. Kodeswaran, D.P. Seetharam, N. Banerjee and S. Kalyanaraman. CPS-Net: In-network aggregation for synchrophasor applications, IEEE COMSNETS IAMCOM, January 2011.
Y. Srinivasan , S.K. Ghai, A. Mittal, D.P. Seetharam, J. Hazra and S. Kalyanaraman. Yupik - Intelligent consumption management, Interactive Demo in IEEE COMSNETS, January 2011.

J. Hazra and D.P. Seetharam.A Network Congestion Management Approach Considering the Risk of Cascading Failures, IEEE Power Engineering Society Conference. 2010.
V. T. Chakaravarthy, V. Pandit, Y. Sabharwal and D.P. Seetharam. Varying Bandwidth Resource Allocation Problem with Bag Constraints. IEEE IPDPS 2010.

D.P. Seetharam and R. Fletcher. Battery Powered RFID, ACM SenseID 2007, November 2007. The comparison of the different types of battery-powered RFID tags have been explored.

D.P. Seetharam and S. Rhee. An efficient RNG for Low-power Sensor Networks, IEEE EmNets-I, November 2004.
S. Rhee, D.P. Seetharam and S. Liu. i-Beans: An Ultra-low Power Wireless Sensor Network, Demo, ACM MOBISYS, August 2004.
S. Rhee, D.P. Seetharam and S. Liu. Techniques for Reducing Power Consumption in Low-data Rate Wireless Sensor Networks. IEEE WCNC, March 2004.An accomplished leader with deep technical skills for designing innovative solutions and soft skills for commercializing those innovations.

S. Rhee, D.P. Seetharam, S. Liu, N. Wang and J. Xiao. i-Beans: An Ultra-low Power Wireless Sensor Network, Interactive Poster in the Fifth UBICOMP, October 2003.
K. Larson, T. Lawrence, T. McLeish, D.P. Seetharam and H. Shrikumar. A Network for Customizable + Reconfigurable Housing, Home Oriented Informatics and Telematics (HOIT), April 2003.

J. Lifton, D.P. Seetharam, M. Broxton, and J. Paradiso. Pushpin Computing System Overview: A platform for distributed, embedded, ubiquitous sensor networks, International Conference on Pervasive Computing, August 2002.
J. Mitteldorf, D. Croll, C. Ravela, D.P. Seetharam, R. Bell and D. Bocelli. On the Prudent Predator: Individual-based Modeling of Multilevel Selection and the Evolution of Predatory Restraint, International Conference on Complex Systems, June 2002.

T. Doan, P. Haddawy, T. Nguyen, and D.P. Seetharam. A Hybrid Bayesian Network Modeling Environment, The National Computer Science and Engineering Conference (NCSEC), 1999.

Patent No. - 10,630,099 - Reducing conversion losses and minimizing load via appliance level distributed storage
Patent No. - 10,359,775 - Managing electricity usage for an appliance
Patent No. - 10,304,099 - Vehicle-to-vehicle energy market system
Patent No. - 10,215,814 - System and method for cognitive alarm management for the power grid
Patent No. - 10,007,285 - Injecting electricity into a grid from distributed generation
Patent No. - 9,847,660 - Managing a picogrid with a computing device
Patent No. - 9,841,456 - Electric outage detection and localization
Patent No. - 9,748,771 - Plug arrangements for alleviating peak loads
Patent No. - 9,691,112 - Grid-friendly data center
Patent No. - 9,647,458 - Distributed phase balancing
Patent No. - 9,536,198 - Non-technical loss detection and localization
Patent No. - 9,465,376 - Managing electricity usage for an appliance
Patent No. - 9,343,904 - Power factor
Patent No. - 9,312,695 - Condition-based management of power transformers
Patent No. - 9,285,242 - Determining a connectivity model in smart grids
Patent No. - 9,165,092 - Wind farm layout in consideration of three-dimensional wake
Patent No. - 9,014,868 - Power factor
Patent No. - 8,825,416 - Systems and methods for phase identification
Patent No. - 8,738,546 - Self-organizing energy pricing

Projects

Coming Soon....

Recognitions

His various projects have been covered by prominent media outlets such as Boston Globe, BBC, IEEE Spectrum, MIT Technology Review, New Scientist, Scientific American, Slashdot and Wired.

Recognized as an IoT thought leader by India IoT Congress, 2017.
Best paper award at ACM e-Energy 2014.
Best paper award at ACM Buildsys 2014.
Best paper award at IEEE COMSNETS E6 2012.
Best paper finalist at ACM e-Energy 2013.
IBM Fourth Patent Plateau award, 2014.
IBM Client Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, 2013.
IBM Eminence and Excellence Award, 2013.
IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, 2012.
IBM Research Accomplishment Award, 2011.
IBM Client Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, 2011.
IBM Client Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, 2010.
Santa Fe Institute sustainability summer school scholarship, 2010.
First prize in the consumer electronics category of 2006 MIT Business Plan Competition.
MIT Media Laboratory graduate research assistantship.
Santa Fe Institute complex systems summer school scholarship, 2002.
Excellent Performer award from Syntel Software Private Limited, 1995.
Placed in the top 99th percentile in Sun Microsystems’ worldwide Java Developer certification exam, 1998.
Technician class Ham Radio license, 2007

Talks

16 Talks As A Distinguished Speaker

"Distributed Energy Networks Panel Discussion", ACM e-Energy, July 2015.
Keynote talk at IEEE Comsnets E6, Bangalore, January 2014.
"Smarter Energy Systems", University of Waterloo, December 2013.
“Real-time contingency analysis”, US-India High-performance computing workshop, Indian Institute of Science, December 2013.
“nPlug: An Autonomous Peak Load Controller”, MIT Energy Club, June 2013.
“Demand Management Systems”, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, June 2013.
“Hidden costs of power cuts and battery backups”, IISc Bosch Center, May 2013.
“ICT For Energy Sustainability: How Computer Science can save the World”, IEEE COMSNETS, January 2012.
“Energy Management Panel Discussion”, IEEE Ants, December 2011
“An Introduction to Sustainability Issues”, Global Sustainability Summer School, July 2011.
“IBM and Smart Grids”, IBM Regional Technical Exchange, May 2011.
“Smart Grids for India”, IEEE Industry day, March 2011.
“Smart Grids Panel Discussion”, IEEE Comsnets, January 2011.
“Middleware for Cyber Physical Systems”, ACM Middleware, December 2010.
“Build Your Own Linux Cell Phone”, O’Reilly E-Tel, January 2006.
“Active RFID technologies”, IdTechEx RFID Summit, November 2005.

Testimonials

Deva is a friend, philosopher and mentor to me. An absolutely zero bullshit person with very high level of integrity and very vivid first hand understanding of Business in Technology. He acts as my sounding board and coach. Given the challenges of running a startup, having someone like Deva by my side gives me great strength.
- Ganesh Shankar, Founder and CEO, FluxGen Technologies

For anyone looking for an extremely smart mind who is brutally honest with his opinions for some refreshing advice, I would highly recommend Deva. With huge experience in IoT and machine learning technologies and his no-bullshit approach, Deva has definitely saved us months of futile efforts putting us onto path of high impact based actions. His understanding of the energy market allows him to come up with insights on product design, market entry strategy and the commercial viability within no time.
- Aditya Bhatt, Co-founder and CEO, Airprobe.in

Our Product Development Coach introduced us to Deva to review our product architecture and engage in dialogues with our team to help resolve key product related questions. We found him to be a very insightful person who, though reticent, successfully gets to the heart of the issue. Our team picked up some good learnings from Deva’s rich experience in one day of interaction.
- Arjun Gupta, Founder and CEO, SmartJoules

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I am Deva P. Seetharam

About me

Startups

DataGlen

RadioSherpa

Publications & Patents

List of Publications

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2007

2004

2003

2002

1999

List of Patents