Venkata Narayana Padmanabhan is a computer scientist and the Managing Director atMicrosoft Research India.^[1] He is known for his research in networked and mobile systems. He is an elected fellow of theIndian National Academy of Engineering,^[2]Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers^[3] and theAssociation for Computing Machinery.^[4] TheCouncil of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him theShanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Engineering Sciences in 2016.^[5]

Padmanabhan did his graduate studies in computer Science and Engineering at theIndian Institute of Technology, Delhi and after earning a BTech in 1993, he pursued his higher studies atUniversity of California, Berkeley from where he secured a master's degree (MS) under the guidance of Domenico Ferrari in 1995 and a PhD, advised byRandy Katz in 1998.^[6] With Katz, he worked on Web Data Transport and his thesis,Addressing the Challenges of Web Data Transport.^[7][8][9] Starting his career atMicrosoft Research Redmond, USA, he served there for over 8 years before returning to India and founding theMobility, Networks and Systems group atMicrosoft Research India in 2007. He was appointed Deputy Managing Director in 2018 and took over as the Managing Director in 2024. He has also been an Adjunct Professor in theEECS Division at theIndian Institute of Science since 2018.^[10]

Padmanabhan has done extensive research onIndoor positioning systems, smartphone-based sensing, and mobile communication and his work has resulted in the development of technologies which is being used by Microsoft in their products.^[11] He has documented his researches by way of several articles;^{[12][note 1]} He has been involved with the organization of ACM SIGCOMM conferences and served as the general co-chair of the 2010 edition in New Delhi and as the program co-chair of the 2012 edition.^[13] He has served on the editorial boards of journals such asACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review,IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, andIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.^[6] and chaired the Award Committee for ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Paper Award in 2017^[14] and the ACM SIGCOMM Test-of-Time Paper Award in 2022.^[15]

TheAssociation for Computing Machinery elected Padmanabhan as aDistinguished Scientist in 2009 and as aFellow in 2016.^[4] He was elected a Fellow ofInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers^[3] in 2012 and of theIndian National Academy of Engineering in 2014.^[2] The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research awarded him theShanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, one of the highest Indian science awards in 2016.^[16] The following year, Padmanabhan became a laureate of theAsian Scientist 100 by theAsian Scientist.^[17] He has also received test-of-time paper awards from ACM SIGMOBILE in 2016 and 2019,^[18] ACM SenSys in 2019,^[19] and ACM SIGMM in 2020 (Honourable Mention for 2002).^[20] He was also among those recognized with the SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award 2020 for being among the "leading source code committers to ns-2".^[21]

• Venkata Narayana Padmanabhan (1998).Addressing the Challenges of Web Data Transport. University of California, Berkeley.

• Paramvir Bahl, Venkata N. Padmanabhan, Anand Balachandran (2000). "Enhancements to the RADAR User Location and Tracking System".Microsoft Research.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Venkata N. Padmanabhan, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian (2001). "An investigation of geographic mapping techniques for internet hosts".ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review.31 (4):173–185.doi:10.1145/964723.383073.
• Ashwin R. Bharambe, Cormac Herley, Venkata N. Padmanabhan (2005). "Analyzing and Improving BitTorrent Performance".Microsoft Research.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Kamal Jain, Jitendra Padhye, Venkata N. Padmanabhan,Lili Qiu (2005). "Impact of interference on multi-hop wireless network performance".Wireless Networks.11 (4):471–487.CiteSeerX 10.1.1.137.3991.doi:10.1007/s11276-005-1769-9.S2CID 45623430.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Prashanth Mohan, Venkata N. Padmanabhan, Ramachandran Ramjee (2008). "Nericell".Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Embedded network sensor systems. pp. 323–336.doi:10.1145/1460412.1460444.hdl:11323/7458.ISBN 9781595939906.S2CID 15670816.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

• Venkata Padmanabhan publications indexed byGoogle Scholar
• "Four from city bag Bhatnagar awards".Deccan Herald. 27 September 2016.

• Ashwin R. Bharambe, Venkata N. Padmanabhan (2005)."Analyzing and Improving BitTorrent Performance"(PDF).Microsoft Research Technical Report. Microsoft.

• 1970s births
• Living people
• Recipients of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Engineering Science
• IIT Delhi alumni
• University of California, Berkeley alumni
• Microsoft Research people
• Indian electronics engineers
• Indian computer scientists
• Fellows of the IEEE
• Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
• Fellows of the Indian National Academy of Engineering
• Scientists from Bengaluru
• Engineers from Karnataka

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• Short description matches Wikidata
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• Use Indian English from December 2019
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• Year of birth missing (living people)