Vipul Ved Prakash is a software engineer and Internet entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of anti-spam company Cloudmark, social-media search company

Topsy Topsy may refer to: Arts and entertainment * Topsy, a character in the novel ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' * Topsy, a character in the 2018 film ''Mary Poppins Returns'' * ''Topsy and Eva'', a 1928 film based on ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' * ''Topsy and Tim'', ...

, and open-source AI company TogetherAI. In 2013, Topsy was acquired by

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...

The acquisition was reported to be valued over $200M. In early 2000s, Prakash became widely known for creating Vipul's Razor, a popular open-source anti-spam system. He was named to the list of 2003's Top 100 young innovators in the world by MIT

Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially independent of the university. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "The" in ...

for this work on anti-spam, at the age of 25.

Early life

Vipul Ved Prakash grew up in New Delhi, India. He played competitive

table tennis Table tennis, also known as ping-pong and whiff-whaff, is a sport in which two or four players hit a lightweight ball, also known as the ping-pong ball, back and forth across a table using small solid rackets. It takes place on a hard table div ...

, and attended

St. Stephen's College, Delhi St. Stephen's College is a constituent college of the University of Delhi, widely regarded as one of the oldest and most prestigious colleges for arts and sciences in India. It was established in 1881 by the Cambridge Mission to Delhi. The college ...

for undergraduate studies in

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...

and

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

, but dropped out to pursue his interests in software design.

Work

In the late 1990s, Prakash co-founded, with

Ashish Gulhati Ashish Gulhati (born 1973 in New Delhi, India) author, philosopher, notable for being one of India's first online activists and open source hackers. Open source As one of India's original hackers, Ashish has worked to raise awareness about FOSS ...

, an Internet privacy company (Sense/Net) for early Internet users in India, and wrote for computer magazines and industry journals, including a regular column, "Net Zeppelin", on networking protocols for the Indian edition of ''

PC World Magazine ''PC World'' (stylized as PCWorld) is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. Since 2013, it has been an online only publication. It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal tech ...

''. Prakash has authored several extensions to the

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...

programming language that are published under

open source license An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified and/or shared under defined terms and conditions. This allows end users and commercial compan ...

s and distributed via

CPAN The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) is a repository of over 250,000 software modules and accompanying documentation for 39,000 distributions, written in the Perl programming language by over 12,000 contributors. ''CPAN'' can denote eith ...

. In May, 2000, Prakash and Rishab A. Ghosh published the ''Orbiten Free Software Survey'', which is considered to be one of the first successful attempts at building an empirical model of contribution to open source projects. Prakash worked at

Napster Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Shawn ...

as an engineer. He co-founded Cloudmark along with Napster’s co-founder

Jordan Ritter Jordan Ritter (born February 1, 1978) is an American serial entrepreneur, software architect and angel investor. He is best known for his work at Napster, the file-sharing service he co-founded along with Shawn Fanning and others. His time at N ...

, to provide a commercial alternative to his open-source filter, Vipul's Razor Prakash considers himself a

cypherpunk A cypherpunk is any individual advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change. Originally communicating through the Cypherpunks electronic mailing list, informal g ...

. He created a dolphin-shaped implementation of

RSA algorithm RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) is a public-key cryptosystem that is widely used for secure data transmission. It is also one of the oldest. The acronym "RSA" comes from the surnames of Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, who publicly ...

in Perl that was printed on a T-shirt and sold by ThinkGeek as a protest against restrictive exports laws. Since Topsy's acquisition by Apple, Prakash has served as a Director of Engineering at Apple, Inc and is rumored to be leading a growing search program inside the company. He appeared on the WWDC 2015 stage to introduce iOS Search APIs.Introducing Search APIs - WWDC 2015 - Videos
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References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Prakash, Vipul Ved Living people Cypherpunks 1977 births People from Delhi