Venkata Padmanabhan

[5] Padmanabhan did his graduate studies in computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and after earning a BTech in 1993, he pursued his higher studies at University of California, Berkeley from where he secured a master's degree (MS) under the guidance of Domenico Ferrari in 1995 and a PhD, advised by Randy Katz in 1998.

[7][8][9] Starting his career at the Redmond station of Microsoft, he served there for over 8 years before returning to India as the principal researcher at Microsoft India and heads the Mobility, Networks and Systems group, which he founded in 2007.

Padmanabhan has done extensive research on Indoor positioning systems, smartphone-based sensing, and mobile communication and his work has resulted in the development of technologies which is being used by Microsoft in their products.

[10] He has documented his researches by way of several articles;[11][note 1] He has been involved with the organization of ACM SIGCOMM conferences and served as the general co-chair of the 2010 edition in New Delhi and as the program co-chair of the 2012 edition.

[13] The Association for Computing Machinery elected Padmanabhan as a Distinguished Scientist in 2009 and as a Fellow in 2016.