Ravi Jain, CTO, Vulcan Inc.

We are inundated by difficult challenges – a steadily warming planet, species on the edge of extinction, pandemic illness. Historically, efforts to address these issues have either been the purview of the philanthropic community or scientific organizations. Today we are in a new era where the application of emerging technologies to philanthropic aims helps identify innovative ways to solve complex challenges. While technology cannot be a panacea, at its best it can be a catalytic force for good. At the intersection of science, business and philanthropy, we focus on disruptive solutions that push the boundaries of the state of the art, and ideas that implement technology, business acumen and data orientation to advance our efforts. From protecting Africa’s elephants to preserving fisheries to bringing reliable power and connectivity to underserved areas, new technology can illuminate powerful new tools for making a measurable impact around the world. This keynote address will cover ongoing projects that deploy real-time image recognition through drone technology, enhance rural mobile connectivity and use data to predict and analyze marine populations.

Ravi Jain is the CTO of Vulcan, Inc. He was previously the VP of Apps & Experiences at Motorola Mobility. Prior to that, he was a director and engineering manager at Google, Mountain View, California, focusing on mobile engineering efforts in mobile advertising. At Google he has also led the efforts on location based services, and syndicated mobile search. Previously, from 2002 to 2005, he was Vice President and Director of the Network Services and Security Lab in DoCoMo USA Labs. At DoCoMo he led the US team designing DoCoMo's 4th generation (4G) core network in three key areas: mobility management, QoS and security. From 1992 to 2002 he was in Applied Research, Telcordia Technologies (formerly Bellcore) working on mobile wireless architectures, algorithms, protocols and middleware, as well as open programmable networks. Prior to that he worked for several years on systems and communications software development, performance modeling, and parallel programming. Ravi received the Ph. D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1992, and has numerous publications and patents in the wireless area. Ravi is a member of Phi Kappa Phi, Upsilon Pi Epsilon, ACM, and a Fellow of the IEEE.