Vijay Pandurangan is a Canadian computer scientist and

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and expert on online privacy, known for his work in scientific software education and early technical contributions at

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. He is now based in Virginia. As an adjunct professor at Stanford University, he teaches a course on Software Engineering for Scientists, emphasizing the critical importance of software skills in modern scientific research. In addition to his academic work, Pandurangan has made numerous early-stage investments in various technology startups.

Early life

Pandurangan was born and raised in

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Quebec Quebec ( ; )According to the Canadian government, ''Québec'' (with the acute accent) is the official name in Canadian French and ''Quebec'' (without the accent) is the province's official name in Canadian English is one of the thirtee ...

Career

Google, Twitter, and Benchmark

Pandurangan was an early engineer at

from 2002-2009 and published papers on data storage technologies. He co-founded

Mitro Mitro was a password manager for individuals and teams that securely saved users' logins, and allowed users to log in and share access. On October 6, 2015, the Mitro service shut down. The successor to Mitro is named Passopolis; this is a passwo ...

in 2013 which was then sold to

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. Pandurangan then became head of the Twitter New York engineering office. In this role at Twitter he was responsible for the launch of Twitter products such as the highly anticipated Twitter Moments. He also posted about the high use of

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inside Twitter and their usefulness to remote teams. He and his teams also contributed bug fixes to the Linux kernel. He departed Twitter in 2016 along with several other senior Twitter executives as the company struggled to turn itself around in the face of declining user growth. In October 2016 Pandurangan was hired as entrepreneur-in-residence at

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and he relocated from New York to San Francisco. He is an occasional guest writer for

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and has written on topics such as the success of Snapchat's success in the context of Twitter's stumbles.

Adjunct Professor at Stanford

Since 2022, Pandurangan has been an adjunct professor at Stanford University, teaching Software Engineering for Scientists (BIODS253) .This course emphasizes the importance of coding, using standard tools, writing and testing well-designed programs, and collaborating with peers, as these skills are critical for modern scientists but are generally not taught in academia. Vijay gave a keynote speech in 2022 at the 14th Annual Alberta Prostate Cancer Research Initiative Fall Symposium in

Banff, Alberta Banff is a town within Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada. It is located in Alberta's Rockies along the Trans-Canada Highway, approximately west of Calgary and east of Lake Louise. At above Banff is the community with the second highest ...

on how better software engineering improves scientific and medical research. In 2023, Pandurangan gave a talk at the Pacific Systems Biology conference on the impact of poor software engineering on science

Other projects

Pandurangan is regularly cited in the press for his various projects in big data. These projects included a 2014 successful attempt at de-anonymizing New York City taxicab data which led to

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

then tightening up access to the taxicab data. This data was used to identify possible religious backgrounds of particular drivers as well as to determine the tipping behaviors of celebrities. He also conducted an exposé in 2016 showing that Google's SMS-based account recovery can reduce the security of a Google account. In 2012 he also used big data to analyze color composition of movie posters since the inception of the film industry, showing the evolution of psychological factors and perception over time.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pandurangan, Vijay Living people 20th-century American businesspeople 21st-century American businesspeople Canadian investors Canadian computer programmers American technology company founders American technology chief executives Businesspeople from Montreal Businesspeople from San Francisco Year of birth missing (living people)