Lalitesh Katragadda has worked on some of the world’s most important online tools from Google. He wrote Google Map Maker, a collaborative community tool that lets users fill gaps in Google Maps. He also co-founded Hindi Transliteration, Google’s transliteration service for Hindi that has since been extended to other languages, and Google Finance, the web-based application for financial information.
Next, Katragadda has a rather small goal. To ‘bring the next three billion people online’. To achieve that rather lofty goal, Katragadda, a co-founder of Google India and founding Joint Center Head for two years, is well equipped academically. He has a B.Tech in aerospace engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, an MS in the same subject from the Iowa State University, an MS in design division from the Stanford University, an MS in SCS and a PhD in robotics from the Carnegie Mellon University. While at the Carnegie Mellon, Katragadda worked on the Lunar Rover Initiative.
After his PhD, Katragadda founded a robotics startup which has been acquired by Google, where he started working from 2002, when the now tech giant was just a search engine creating waves. Now as a software engineer at Google, Katragadda is working on geo-data, machine vision, machine learning and space robotics. Ask him about his present goal, and Katragadda says he wants to remove barriers like language that are stopping billions of people from getting online in the next decade.