Vipul Ved Prakash is a

software engineer Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining software applications. It involves applying engineering principles and computer programming expertise to develop ...

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 ...

. He is the co-founder of anti-spam company Cloudmark, social-media search company Topsy, and open-source AI company TogetherAI. In 2013, Topsy was acquired by

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Comput ...

The acquisition was reported to be valued over $200M. In early 2000s, Prakash became widely known for creating Vipul's Razor, a popular open-source

anti-spam Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam (unsolicited bulk email). No technique is a complete solution to the spam problem, and each has trade-offs between incorrectly rejecting legitimate email ( false positives) as opposed ...

system. He was named to the list of 2003's Top 100 young innovators in the world by

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "''The''" in its name on April 23, 1998, under then pu ...

for this work on anti-spam, at the age of 25.

Early life

Vipul Ved Prakash grew up in

New Delhi, India New Delhi (; ) is the Capital city, capital of India and a part of the Delhi, National Capital Territory of Delhi (NCT). New Delhi is the seat of all three branches of the Government of India, hosting the Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Parliament ...

. He played competitive

table tennis Table tennis (also known as ping-pong) is a racket sport derived from tennis but distinguished by its playing surface being atop a stationary table, rather than the Tennis court, court on which players stand. Either individually or in teams of ...

, and attended St. Stephen's College, Delhi for undergraduate studies in

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

physics Physics is the scientific study of matter, its Elementary particle, fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge whi ...

and

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

, but dropped out to pursue his interests in software design.

Work

In the late 1990s, Prakash co-founded, with Ashish Gulhati, an

Internet privacy Internet privacy involves the right or mandate of personal privacy concerning the storage, re-purposing, provision to third parties, and display of information pertaining to oneself via the Internet. Internet privacy is a subset of data privacy. P ...

company (Sense/Net) for early Internet users in India, and wrote for computer magazines and industry journals, including a regular column, "Net Zeppelin", on networking protocols for the Indian edition of ''

PC World Magazine ''PC World'' (stylized as PCWorld) is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. Since 2013, it has been an online-only publication. It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal tec ...

''. Prakash has authored several extensions to the

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

programming language that are published under

open source license Open-source licenses are software licenses that allow content to be used, modified, and shared. They facilitate free and open-source software (FOSS) development. Intellectual property (IP) laws restrict the modification and sharing of creative ...

s and distributed via

CPAN The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) is a software repository of over 220,000 software modules and accompanying documentation for 45,500 distributions, written in the Perl programming language by over 14,500 contributors. ''CPAN'' can de ...

. In May, 2000, Prakash and Rishab A. Ghosh published the ''Orbiten Free Software Survey'', which is considered to be one of the first successful attempts at building an empirical model of contribution to open source projects. Prakash worked at

Napster Napster was an American proprietary peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application primarily associated with digital audio file distribution. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform originally launched on June 1, 1999. Audio shared ...

as an engineer. He co-founded Cloudmark along with Napster’s co-founder

Jordan Ritter Jordan Ritter (born February 1, 1978) is an American serial entrepreneur, software architect and angel investor. He is best known for his work at Napster, the file-sharing service he co-founded along with Shawn Fanning and others. His time at Naps ...

, to provide a commercial alternative to his open-source filter, Vipul's Razor. Prakash considers himself a

cypherpunk A cypherpunk is one who advocates the widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a means of effecting social and political change. The cypherpunk movement originated in the late 1980s and gained traction with th ...

. He created a dolphin-shaped implementation of

RSA algorithm The RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) cryptosystem is a public-key cryptography, public-key cryptosystem, one of the oldest widely used for secure data transmission. The initialism "RSA" comes from the surnames of Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonar ...

in Perl that was printed on a T-shirt and sold by

ThinkGeek ThinkGeek was an American retailer that catered to computer enthusiasts and " geek culture". Described as a " Sharper Image for sysadmins", their merchandise has been likened to "toys for adults, novelties designed to appeal to both your inner c ...

as a protest against restrictive exports laws. Since Topsy's acquisition by Apple, Prakash has served as a Director of Engineering at Apple, Inc and is rumored to be leading a growing search program inside the company. He appeared on the

WWDC The Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is an information technology conference held annually by Apple Inc. The conference is currently held at Apple Park in California. The event is used to showcase new software and technologies in the macO ...

2015 stage to introduce iOS Search APIs.Introducing Search APIs - WWDC 2015 - Videos
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References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Prakash, Vipul Ved Living people Cypherpunks 1977 births Engineers from Delhi