Prasad Ram, former CTO at Yahoo! and Director of Engineering at Google, is the founder and CEO of Ednovo, a non-for-profit education start-up that develops Gooru - a search engine for learning.
Ram's objective in life is to honor the human right to education by developing technologies that organize all learning content and enable communities of teachers, developers and researchers to make quality education accessible to everyone. He started his career working on digital rights management technology (DRM) at Xerox, where he was recognized with the Excellence in Research Award.
In 2004 he joined Yahoo! as Chief Technology Officer of Yahoo! India, where he led the creation of several Yahoo! services and platforms (Audio/Image search, Spam Filtering, Behavioral Targeting, Mobile Data Analysis, Vertical Search, and Content Management).
Ram joined Google's India Research and Development Center in Bangalore in 2006, introducing products and technologies like Mapmaker, News, Finance and Transliteration. He then moved to the U.S to work on Google Books and as Director of Engineering at Google Research.
While in the U.S, he devised a prototype to address the problem of finding age and topic-appropriate educational resources on the web. What began as a small off-time effort evolved into a year-long pilot in India that included 1,000 students across 25 classrooms. Ram subsequently left Google to pursue Gooru as a non-profit education technology start-up.
Prasad Ram holds a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, a master's degree and a Ph.D in Computer Science from University of California-Los Angeles. He currently serves on the governing board of the International School of Information Management (ISiM) at the University of Mysore (India).
