Amit Singhal is a Google Fellow who is responsible for the development of Google Search. Amit has worked in the field of search for over twenty years, first as an academic researcher and now as a Google engineer. His research interests include information retrieval, its application to web search, web graph analysis, and user interfaces for search. At Google, Amit oversees the search quality team, the team responsible for Google’s search algorithms. The team tests thousands of changes to search in a given year and typically launches about 500.

Prior to joining Google in 2000, Amit was a senior member of technical staff at AT&T Labs. Amit has an undergraduate degree in India from IIT, Roorkee, a MS from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. from Cornell University, all in Computer Science. At Cornell, he studied Information Retrieval with the late Gerard Salton, one of the founders of the field.

Amit has co-authored more than thirty scientific papers and numerous patents.

Hersh Kumar heads the Shipra group of companies that has the distinction of running one of the largest private school systems in Houston. Shipra Group is also involved in real estate development and venture capital investments.

Hersh Kumar takes pride in creating one of the finest education systems that is benefiting thousands of children in India and USA. He started a charity foundation with his personal commitment of $20M to help the poor children in India. He is a graduate of IIT Roorkee (gold medalist, ’78) and a postgraduate (’82) of Wayne State University in Michigan. He lives in Houston suburb with his wife Rita Kumar and two children, Shipra and Akshay.

Prof. Vipin Kumar is recognized for his technical contributions to foundational research in data mining as well as its applications to mining scientific data. Prof. Kumar has made numerous significant and impactful contributions to a wide range of core data mining areas including graph partitioning, clustering, association analysis, high performance and parallel data mining, anomaly/change detection and data driven discovery methods for analyzing global climate and ecosystem data. Many of his papers on these topics are amongst the most highly cited papers in data mining.

Prof. Kumar is also well-known for his pioneering research in the areas of high performance and parallel data mining. In particular, his group was amongst the first ones to introduce the concepts of dynamic load balancing (derived from his earlier extensive work on the design of scalable parallel algorithms for unstructured problems) to the parallel formulations of algorithms such as Apriori and decision tree induction.

Prof. Kumar received the B.E. in Electronics & Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee , India , the M.E. in Electronics Engineering from Philips International Institute, Eindhoven , Netherlands , and the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland at College Park.

He is currently William Norris Professor and Head of Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Minnesota . Prof. Kumar is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and AAAS, and a recipient of the 2009 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Computer Science Department, University of Maryland College Park, the ICDM 2008 Outstanding Service Award, and the 2005 IEEE Computer Society's Technical Achievement Award.