Vijay Pandurangan is a Canadian computer scientist and

internet entrepreneur An Internet entrepreneur is an owner, founder or manager of an Internet-based business. This list includes Internet company founders and people brought on to companies for their general business or accounting acumen, as is the case with some CEOs ...

and expert on online privacy, known for his work in scientific software education and early technical contributions at

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. He is now based in Virginia. As an adjunct professor at Stanford University, he teaches a course on Software Engineering for Scientists, emphasizing the critical importance of software skills in modern scientific research. In addition to his academic work, Pandurangan has made numerous early-stage investments in various technology startups.

Early life

Pandurangan was born and raised in

Montreal Montreal is the List of towns in Quebec, largest city in the Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Quebec, the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, second-largest in Canada, and the List of North American cit ...

Quebec Quebec is Canada's List of Canadian provinces and territories by area, largest province by area. Located in Central Canada, the province shares borders with the provinces of Ontario to the west, Newfoundland and Labrador to the northeast, ...

Career

Google, Twitter, and Benchmark

Pandurangan was an early engineer at

from 2002-2009 and published papers on data storage technologies. He co-founded Mitro in 2013 which was then sold to

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

. Pandurangan then became head of the Twitter New York engineering office. In this role at Twitter he was responsible for the launch of Twitter products such as the highly anticipated Twitter Moments. He also posted about the high use of

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inside Twitter and their usefulness to remote teams. He and his teams also contributed bug fixes to the Linux kernel. He departed Twitter in 2016 along with several other senior Twitter executives as the company struggled to turn itself around in the face of declining user growth. In October 2016 Pandurangan was hired as entrepreneur-in-residence at

Benchmark Benchmark may refer to: Business and economics * Benchmarking, evaluating performance within organizations * Benchmark price * Benchmark (crude oil), oil-specific practices Science and technology * Experimental benchmarking, the act of defining a ...

and he relocated from New York to San Francisco. He is an occasional guest writer for

Wired Wired may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Music * ''Wired'' (Jeff Beck album), 1976 * ''Wired'' (Hugh Cornwell album), 1993 * ''Wired'' (Mallory Knox album), 2017 * "Wired", a song by Prism from their album '' Beat Street'' * "Wired ...

and has written on topics such as the success of

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's success in the context of Twitter's stumbles.

Adjunct Professor at Stanford

Since 2022, Pandurangan has been an adjunct professor at Stanford University, teaching Software Engineering for Scientists (BIODS253) .This course emphasizes the importance of coding, using standard tools, writing and testing well-designed programs, and collaborating with peers, as these skills are critical for modern scientists but are generally not taught in academia. Vijay gave a keynote speech in 2022 at the 14th Annual Alberta

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Research Initiative Fall Symposium in

Banff, Alberta Banff is a resort town in Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada, in Alberta's Rockies along the Trans-Canada Highway, west of Calgary, east of Lake Louise, Alberta, Lake Louise, and above Banff was the first municipality to incorporate within ...

on how better software engineering improves scientific and medical research. In 2023, Pandurangan gave a talk at the Pacific Systems Biology conference on the impact of poor software engineering on science

Other projects

Pandurangan is regularly cited in the press for his various projects in

big data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

. These projects included a 2014 successful attempt at de-anonymizing New York City taxicab data which led to

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

then tightening up access to the taxicab data. This data was used to identify possible religious backgrounds of particular drivers as well as to determine the tipping behaviors of celebrities. He also conducted an exposé in 2016 showing that Google's SMS-based account recovery can reduce the security of a Google account. In 2012 he also used big data to analyze color composition of movie posters since the inception of the film industry, showing the evolution of psychological factors and perception over time.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pandurangan, Vijay Living people 20th-century American businesspeople 21st-century American businesspeople Canadian investors Canadian computer programmers American technology company founders American technology chief executives Businesspeople from Montreal Businesspeople from San Francisco Year of birth missing (living people)