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 is one of the leading global developers of Mobile Social Media and Value Added Services enabling mobile subscribers to reach out to their family and friends. Kirusa’s solutions include the hugely successful Kirusa Voice SMS service, the world’s most advanced Voice SMS solution, used by over 30 carriers around the world. Kirusa has pioneered a suite of social media applications that facilitate mobile subscribers to interact through voice, including the Call-n-Tweet application which helps users update their Twitter status using voice. Kirusa provides an open platform with APIs to enable third parties to offer mobile applications services to mobile subscribers. Used by mobile subscribers millions of times daily, Kirusa solutions are built on its patented and patent pending technology and its highly reliable and scalable open multimodal platform. Kirusa has been recognized as one of top 100 technology companies by Silicon India, and one of top 25 emerging technology companies by Smart Techie magazine. Headquartered in New Jersey and led by an experienced team of wireless telecom executives and technologists, Kirusa has offices in three continents. ‘Kirusa Voice SMS,’ is a trademark of Kirusa, Inc.

For more information visit: www.kirusa.com.

Media Contacts

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Kirusa
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