C.V. Ramdas: Technical Consultant, C-DAC
During his professional journey of about 35 years in the technology industry, Chitrapu Venkata Ramdas has been involved in roles spanning from hands-on R&D to strategic corporate management, in the government as well as private sector. In the past decade, he has served as adviser, technology management Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Bengaluru, and as general manager IT, Bengaluru Metro Rail Corporation Limited (BMRCL). He is now back at C-DAC, working as a technical consultant, helping in establishing a project management office for the Delhi Safe City Project.
With years of experience in various technology and application domains, Ramdas comprehends complex solutions requiring heterogeneous technologies. He specialises in real-time computational systems, digital signal processing, pattern recognition, and safety critical systems in the aerospace and railway signalling sectors. He has established several R&D labs in the areas of mobile computing, augmented reality (AR), internet of things (IoT) and cryptography. When asked about his most memorable assignments, Ramdas recalls two in particular. “I pioneered the AR work in C-DAC with a turnkey project aimed at building AR solutions for the education domain,” he says. “Giving a push to Make in India, at BMRCL, I initiated the development and deployment of the official mobile application that commuters are using. This was followed by the development and deployment of a contactless thermal scanner that is installed at all station entrances today,” he says.
Ramdas believes that taking investment risks in new technologies is still a challenge in India and the majority of R&D outcomes hardly make it past the prototype stage. However, with the government’s investment forecasts for infrastructure building for 5G, he foresees better prospects for the deployment of innovative applications in the information and communication technology domain. “I also believe that investments in local R&D need to be encouraged across all industry players, including the services sector,” notes Ramdas. His current areas of interest comprise the use of gestures and brainwaves for implementing hands-free controls, remotely piloted vehicles, machine learning, AR, IoT applications and knowledge dissemination.
Ramdas has a master’s degree in electronics instrumentation and telecommunications and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Missouri Rolla, USA. His family comprises his wife, a homemaker, who loves travelling, and their two children, who are both software engineers. Ramdas is fond of music. “We have a guitar, a couple of keyboards, a melodica and a few harmonicas that I play,” he says.
