Kirusa Harnesses AT&T Experience with New
Management Team Members
Vijay Saraswat and David Berkley bring the multimodal infrastructure
development company more than 45 years of industry expertise
BERKELEY HEIGHTS, NJ, July 23, 2001 - Kirusa,
an emerging infrastructure developer of multimodal applications,
has expanded its executive management team: Vijay Saraswat as
vice president of engineering and David Berkley as chief scientist.
Saraswat and Berkley's extensive history in the creation of wireless
applications and voice recognition technology deepens Kirusa's
knowledge for developing the latest in the convergence of voice
and visual interfaces, or multimodal interfaces, for delivering
data applications to wireless devices.
"All Kirusa executives have some of the most respected expertise
in the telecom industry," said Inderpal Mumick, CEO and founder
of Kirusa. "Vijay's and David's experience will help give
Kirusa a competitive edge for developing the next wave of user-friendly
and efficient data delivery offerings for wireless devices. We
are most fortunate to have such talent guiding Kirusa towards
the forefront of the next wave of wireless, multimodal infrastructure."
Vijay Saraswat is serving as vice president of engineering for
Kirusa. He has more than 15 years of experience in wireless networks,
instant messaging, distributed computing, artificial intelligence,
natural languages, logic, and programming languages. Prior to
joining Kirusa, Vijay was CTO of a wireless startup, and before
that Vijay was at AT&T Shannon Labs, where he helped develop
AT&T's instant messaging strategy, established the Network
Communities group, and led the development of AT&T's instant
messaging solution and its delivery to AT&T Wireless. This
system is currently deployed by AT&T WorldNet. Vijay has also
led the development of a real-time two way messaging platform
for wide-area wireless networks. Vijay was the co-founder of the
IETF Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol (IMPP) Working Group.
Vijay is an inventor of nearly a dozen (granted and pending) software
patents. Vijay received his doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon in
1989; his thesis won the ACM Doctoral Dissertation award and was
published by MIT Press. Vijay received his bachelors in technology
(and a Gold Medal for excellence) from IIT Kanpur in 1982.
David Berkley is Kirusa's chief scientist. In 1968, after spending
two years as a research associate at the Electron-Physics Institute
of Chalmers Technical University in Gothenberg, Sweden, he joined
AT&T Bell Laboratories. In 1995 he became the division manager,
Global Services, Enhanced Voice Product Management where he was
responsible for InfoWorx, Advanced Transaction Processing, advanced
voice platforms and SDNmobility features. In early 1996, he joined
AT&T Labs Research as division manager of Speech Processing
Software and Technology. Two years later, he was named Speech
and Image Processing Services Vice President, where he had overall
responsibility for research in speech recognition, speaker recognition,
speech understanding, and spoken language translation. He also
helped foster new technologies in multimodal interfaces and in
image and video processing. In addition, he led the creation of
business development and technical agreements with leading speech
and image technology vendors to forward these technologies. He
is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and a Senior
Member of the IEEE with nearly 40 published papers and seven patents.
He holds a bachelor's of electrical engineering and a doctorate
degree in applied physics from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.
Recently, Kirusa announced its closing of more than $3 million
in equity investment from Innovacom, a venture capital subsidiary
of France Telecom, and Deutsche Bank. Saraswat and Berkley join
Kirusa's executive team along with Louis Golm, former president
of Vodafone Airtouch and former CEO of AT&T Japan; Inderpal
Mumick, Kirusa CEO and founder; and Sandeep Sibal, CTO and founder.
About Kirusa
Kirusa, Inc. is an infrastructure company developing technology
for the delivery of mobile applications using multimodal interfaces.
This next generation of wireless technology allows users to customize
the presentation of information on wireless devices by either
alternating, or simultaneously receiving data through visual and
voice interfaces. Kirusa is funded by France Telecom Innovacom,
Deutsche Bank, Silicon Alley Seed Investors, and several angel
investors. The company is headquartered in Berkeley Heights ,
N.J. and was founded by telecom and Internet industry veterans
from AT&T, Lucent and Vodafone Airtouch. For more information
about Kirusa call its headquarters at (908) 464-4467, email info@kirusa.com
or visit www.kirusa.com.
Media Contacts
Edelman Public Relations, Global Technology
Christine Attalla
(312) 240-2722
Christine.Attalla@edelman.com
Renee Schwager
(312) 297-7430
Renee.Schwager@edelman.com
© 2001-2012 Kirusa, Inc.