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• Can you tell us about your first experience using a computer?

  My first interaction with using a computer was in 1990 when I sat in a computer class booting an XT Amstrad computer with 5.25" floppy drive into DOS. It was absolutely fascinating and very quickly I learned to load Quick Basic and do all sort of mathematical calculations for my Physics and Maths classes. For a 13 year old, it was pure magic. I quickly started fiddling with graphics, printer drivers, Lotus 123, Wordstar, Wordperfect and lots of games and soon self-taught myself to program in lots of languages such as QB, C, C++, Pascal, VB and my favorite hobby soon was to create utility programs to make my homework easier.

• What is the technological evolution that has marked you most and what will be, in your eyes, a turning point in this field?

  I saw the first technological evolution when cloud computing became widespread. Previously there was a limitation on how powerful your applications were depending on the local or the server ram, speed etc. With cloud computing, suddenly you could have almost unlimited resources available. The field has grown tremendously and the ability to write serverless programs was one thing that fascinated me a lot. I think the new turning point in this field would be APIs which would be directly able to access AI capabilities almost effortlessly. At this point, there is still some setup required to develop these APIs but in time it would become more automated.

• Explain your expertise, your interest in it and, more broadly, its importance in the computer world.

  I love computing scientific and data intensive problems, whether it be through coding, memory management, using tools and programming, leveraging cloud and databases or visualisation. I use a wide range of tools ranging from simple Excel spreadsheet to complicated Python code. I would love to sharpen my tools in this area and the importance in the computer world is that as computing becomes more simplified and powerful, all aspects of computing will improve including generative AI.

• Do so-called 'visionaries', such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg inspire you or do you have other role models?

  Yes they inspire me as they took a very simple problem, iteratively solved it and then honed their skills to master the problem and open doors to solutions to new problems. A simple DOS program led ways to powerful paradigms in the computing world. Similarly Linux revolutionalised computing and more or less these are works of single visionary who based through all the problems they had to face to enable a next generation to build on their vision.

• What would you say to an uncomfortable person in front of a screen who says that "IT is too complicated"?

  I would say yes "IT is too complicated... until you understand how to solve the problems and then you can use IT to solve so many of your problems". I would go about explaining to the user how to remove complications in a simple manner and then give them opportunity to practice and ask questions till the time the particular task no longer was complicated. Then I would ask the person to come up with a related problem they thought complicated and to solve it using their newly acquired skills.

• What are your other passions, related or non-related to computers?

  I love to program in whatever language I would get my hand on. I love to compare and contrast which programming languages handles the problem most elegantly and over the years I have fallen in love with the Ruby programming language. It is super elegant and handles problems in a very nice manner. Besides this I love to play tennis.