One of the most acclaimed science fiction novels of 2011 is The Silicon Jungle. Over 350-odd pages it manages to introduce us to the implications of private companies holding vast amounts of data and the frightening possibilities of that data falling into the wrong hands. The fictional Ubatoo empire described in the book brings to mind only one name. Google. The most surprising part of the novel though is not in the story, but in the name of the author. It’s Shumeet Baluja, who works at the real life Ubatoo, Google. Baluja has a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Virginia, and a PhD in Computer Science from the Carnegie Mellon University. At present, working as a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google, Baluja is a famous computer scientist who happens to be a part-time novelist. Now at Google, Baluja is working on topics as varied as image processing and machine learning. He has a number of patents to his name in fields like facial image processing.