Dr. A.K. Chakravarti, an alumnus of BITS, Pilani and IIT, Delhi is currently Adviser in the Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Government of India. He is currently Group Coordinator of R&D in IT Group, R&D in Communications & Convergence and Broadcasting Technologies and E-Commerce Division.

Dr. Chakravarti is always engaged in learning new subjects and develop India’s response to these emerging opportunities. As Member/Convenor/Co-Chairman/Chairman of various Expert Committees/Panels/ Task Force over the years, Dr. Chakravarti is developed a large number of national initiatives.

Dr. Chakravarti has authored more than 30 research publications in international journals. Over the years, he has also authored/co-authored more than 100 detailed in-depth studies/analysis reports in Microwave, Photonics & Optical Fibre Communications, R&D Models & Technology Management, Technology Forecasting, National Information Infrastructure for National Development, Software Export Strategies, E-Governance, E-Commerce & more recently M-Commerce, Online Learning, IPR, Cyberlaws Series to provide technical inputs leading to IT Act 2000 & now amendments to IT Act 2008, Internet Sanitization, Cyber Security & Privacy, Multi-applications Smart Card, RFID, Ubiquitous Computing, Free/Open Source Software & Open Technology, Bioinformatics, Digital Preservation, and other emerging areas.

As the Chairman of the Steering Committee of the Working Group on National Digital Preservation Programme, Dr. Chakravarti is collaborating with experts & stake-holders to develop action plan for digital preservation in the country.

Dr. Chakravarti is a Member of the Governing Council of C-DAC. Recognising his contribution over the years, Dr. Chakravarti was given IIT Delhi Alumni Association Award for Outstanding Contribution of National Development

P.S.Narotra, Senior Director in Department of Information Technology, Government of India leads the International Cooperation (Multilateral) activities in the Department.

He has over 30 years experience to his credit out of which over 20 years experience is in the field of Information Technology driving policies and projects of Software Technology Parks of India and Satcomm Services India – both aimed at development of software exports from India. Prior to joining Department of Information Technology, Government of India he served in Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) – one of the largest Public Sector Undertakings (PSU) of the Government of India and in a Financial Institution. At present he is involved in WTO GATS services negotiations, UN programmes like Global Alliance for ICT and Development, Commonwealth Connects Programme of the Commonwealth and is driving the National Digital Preservation Programme (NDPP) in the Department of Information Technology.

Presently, Dinesh Katre is Group Coordinator of Human Centred Design and Computing Group at C-DAC, Pune. Earlier, he successfully established and managed the National Multimedia Resource Centre of C-DAC for about 10 years. This activity was established under his leadership at C-DAC and with the sponsorship of Dept. of Information Technology, Govt. of India in 1998. He has Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) from BITS, Pilani and M. Des. Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. His Ph.D. research was fully sponsored and hosted by C-DAC.

During past 16 years at C-DAC, he has conceptualized and implemented many R&D projects that deal with Digital Library Technologies for Indian Heritage, Museum Archives, e-Learning, Game Design, Multimedia Authoring and Digital Content Creation. He is the principle designer of many software, content and training products, to name a few- JATAN: Virtual Museum Builder, Multimedia Rendering of Dnyaneshwari and Bhagvadgita. CD ROMs on Life and Work of Srinivasa Ramanujan: The Mathematical Genius developed by his team was released at the hands of Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, Former President of India in 2004.

He has published 25 research papers in international conferences and journals, which mainly focus on digital collection management, e-learning and Human-Computer Interaction and Usability. He has been a member of programme committees for international conferences like India-Human Computer Interaction (I-HCI 2004), INTERACT 2009, Sweden. He was chief mentor for the Conference on Advances in Usability Engineering (CAUE 2008). He is also on the editorial board of i-manager’s Journal of Education Technology.

• B. Tech (Electrical Engineering) from IIT Kharagpur in 1970.
• M. Tech (Electrical Engineering) with Specialisation in
  Computer Science from IIT Kanpur in 1972.
• Submitted Ph. D. Thesis in University of East Anglia,
  Norwich, United Kingdom in 1984.
• International Visitor Programme, United States of America.

Professional Experiences:

• From 1972 to 1976: Electronic Industries, New Delhi.
• From 1976 to 2001: Department of Information Technology, Govt. of India, New Delhi.
  
• From 2001 - 2009 : Former Executive Director, Centre for
  Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Kolkata.

Professional Interest in:

• Computer Software Development
• Real Time Software Development
• RDBMS
• Multimedia Content Creation
• Natural Language Processing

Shalini Urs is an Information Scientist having interest in all matters of the mind - from creativity to cognitive to cultural. Taking a 360 degree view of information, she has researched on issues ranging from the theoretical foundations of information science to technological aspects of digital libraries. Her areas of research include – Relevance and Information Retrieval, Metadata, Ontology and Social Network Analysis, User Experiences, and digital libraries.

Shalini is currently the Executive Director and Professor at the International School of Information Management (ISiM) (www.isim.ac.in ). Shalini has founded the ISiM with munificent grants from the Ford Foundation and is based on the Public-Private Partnership model, with funds from different organizations. She conceptualized ISiM as an innovative institution focusing on all aspects of ‘information’ and ‘Informatics’.

Shalini’s teaching career spanning over 33 years at the University of Mysore, has panned the entire spectrum of the field of Informatics and Information Sciences – Classification and Indexing to Information Retrieval to Medical Information Systems to Digital Libraries and Content Management Systems.

She was a visiting professor at the Documentation Research and Training Centre, Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore during 1998 & 99 and a Fulbright scholar and visiting professor at Virginia Tech, USA during 2000-1. Her major accomplishments include – the Vidyanidhi Digital Library project (www.vidyanidhi.org.in), an internationally known Indian digital library. Currently she is the Chair of the Steering Committee of the Asian Digital Libraries, and the Vice Chair of Consortium of iSchools of Asia Pacific (CiSAP). She is a sought after speaker at many international conferences and meetings. She has served on the Program Committees of all the three DL conference series – JCDL (ACM and IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries), ECDL (European Conference on Digital Libraries) and ICADL. She has also been spearheading a summit series called – InfoVision since 2005.

A faculty member of Documentation Research and Training Centre (DRTC), Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Bangalore. Holds M.A. and M.Phil. in Philosophy and BLISc, ADIS and Ph.D. in Library and Information Science. Presently interested in Open Access to Information, Digital Libraries and Semantic Web Technology. Other interest is to read history and mythology.

A member of DSpace Governance Advisory Committee, National Knowledge Commission (Working Group on Libraries), UGC Curriculum Development Committee, UGC ETD Guidelines Committee, Retro-conversion committee of National Library of India. Consultant to United Nations – Food and Agricultural Organization (UN-FAO). A Fullbright Scholar in 1999 and Visiting Faculty of University of Trento. Currently active in European Commissions FP7-FET project on Living Knowledge. Editor of the proceedings of the International Conference on Semantic Web and Digital Libraries (ICSD-2007). Guest Editor of Online Information Review, V.32(4), 2008, special edition on Semantic Web and Web Design.

Sanjeev Kumar Gupta, Government Programs Executive in IBM leads the Public Policy, Policy driven growth, Drive Innovations and strategic partnerships, and Government affairs.

He has over twelve years experience to his credit driving policies on open standards, R&D, Innovations and Environment etc from IBM and delivering several successful projects in Government before joining IBM. He comes from Services of Government of India and has achieved various milestones in Ministry of Programme Implementation, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare etc. Over the years he has built expertise in the area of public policy, strategy and establishing organisations.

He is a visiting professor at NIHFW, New Delhi and speaker in various seminars, workshops organised by FICCI, CII, Trading Blocs, UN Organisations representing IBM.

Sanjeev is a postgraduate in science, MBA from FMS and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt from ASQ. He loves reading books and cooking.

Ramesh C.Gaur is Librarian & Head, Kala Nidhi, and the Project Coordinator of ABIA Art and Archeology Index (www.abia.net ) at Indira Gandhi National Centre for the arts (www.ignca.nic.in ), New Delhi. Digitization, Digital Preservation and Digital Archiving of Indian Cultural Heritage are the main areas of his present assignment.

A Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Gaur is a Science graduate with Ph.D in Reengineering Library and Information Services, with exposure to several-advanced training programme on the applications of IT to Library Management. His past assignments at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, Institute of Management Technology (IMT), Ghazaibad and Management Development Institute (MDI), Gurgaon have been widely acknowledged by both the profession and the organizations where he has worked.

Dr. Gaur has visited USA, Germany, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and the Netherlands in relation to various assignments related to Digital Library and allied areas.

He is the Member of Governing Board of Delhi Public Library (Ministry of Culture, GOI). He has also represented various Committees such as UGC National Committee on e-theses, National Knowledge Commission Committee on Private Collections, etc. Conferences He is the Life Trustee of Ranganathan Research Trust and Founder Convenor of Ranganathan Research Circle (RRC), New Delhi.

Muralidharan Kesavan has 9+ years of work experience with expertise in testing and test automation of enterprise storage hardware and their management software.

He has worked in various test teams and test automation teams of multiple storage array vendors like Dell, EMC and Sun Microsystems. Muralidharan is proficient in testing storage arrays, SCSI controllers, RAID controllers (Adaptec, LSI) and their management software. He is also good in Perl and Python programming.

He also has expertise in designing and building test automation infrastructure especially for testing of storage arrays. He has worked on various heterogeneous SAN arrays like HP-EVA, EMC Clariion (CX Series), EMC Symmetrix, Sun StorEdge Disk Arrays etc., He has good knowledge on various storage network virtualization techniques and has worked in QA team for EMC Invista which is based on network based out-of-band virtualization.
Muralidharan has published white paper on storage testing and has been a speaker on a storage testing methodology during the 6th International Conference on Software Testing organized by Software Test Practitioners Forum – India.

His areas of interest are Storage Networks, Storage Virtualization, Storage related Testing, Open Source Solutions, Data Redundancy Techniques, Cloud Computing and Information Lifecycle Management.

Received formal education in basic sciences from University of Kashmir. Did MLISc from Delhi University, Masters in Public Administration from University of Rajasthan and Ph.D. from Jiwaji University, Gwalior. Since joining INSDOC in August 1983, was associated with number of assignments including computer application to various activities, education and training, bibliometrics, number of consultancy and sponsored projects etc. During her tenure at INSA, New Delhi as Head, Informatics Centre, she was looking after several activities pertaining to: Informatics Centre, Science Popularization, Science and Society, Science Education programmes and also bringing out a quarterly publication – Science Information Notes (SIN). Currently involved with several Digitization projects. Initiated the digitization projects at INSA in 1999 and has already converted besides other material, all Academy journals in the electronic format which are available as open archive resources for free and open online access for the scientific community in particular. In addition a digital repository has also been created which at present has publications of INSA Fellows that is getting populated, besides other collections/communities . She joined Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) as Chief Librarian and Head of the Library, Documentation and Information Science Division, that comprised Library, Repro Unit, Museum & Archives and teaching and training unit - DRTC at Bangalore. Presently at Indian Institute of public Administration (IIPA), she is heading the Library. Dr. Munshi is actively associated with teaching and training as resource person organized by various academic and R&D institutions. Have over 120 research publications and a few books to her credit, besides a number of other publications. Recipient of Raizada Memorial Award 1994 for Young Information Scientist of the Society of Information Science (SIS); SIS Fellowship in 1999; Fulbright Scholarship in 1996-97. The paper on Building Digital Resources has been selected as one of the papers under the ASSIST International Best Paper Award category by ASSIST, USA in 2002. Received SATKAL Best Librarian Award 2002. Member 4 National delegation to Germany pertaining to LIS education - trends and developments. Received Indo-French Cultural Research program Award and visited France for research work. Recently, Dr. Munshi has recently obtained post of DEA (directeur d` etudes associe),  an academic recognition given to her by Fondation Maison des sciences de l`homme, Paris, (France) for which she would be visiting some host research institutions in France for a short duration  for pursuing her work plan.  

Nominated from November 2003 as a Reviewer for the International journal – Malaysian Journal of Library & information science, published by University of Malaya. Nominated as a member for the Steering Committee of IAP and task force on Digital resources - US National Academy of Sciences. Currently acting as a member of various national and international committees in the area of information science and technology. Editorial Board member – DJLIT, Desidoc, New Delhi and International Journal of Digital libraries, TERI, New Delhi. Research interests include information technology with special reference to human computer interaction and Bibliometrics. Member of number of professional bodies and is currently serving as executive member in some of them.

Dr. Jagdish Arora, joined as the Director of Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) Centre in August, 2007. Prior to his present assignment, Dr. Arora has worked as the Librarian and Deputy Librarian at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi from Sept. 2003 to August 2007 and from March 1991 to June 2002 respectively. He was also the National Coordinator of the INDEST-AICTE Consortium, one of the most successful consortia initiatives in India. He was also Librarian at IIT Bombay from June, 2002 to August, 2003. He was Documentation Officer at the National Institute of Immunology, Delhi (1983 - 1991) and Asstt. Documentation Officer, ICRISAT, Patancheru, A.P. (1980 - 1983).

Dr. Arora is recipient of Fulbright Professional Fellowship in Library and Information Science (1997 – 98), SIS Fellow (1999), Young Librarian of the Year (2001, SATKAL), Librarian of the Year (IASLIC, 1999) and ILA-Kuala Best Librarian Award, 2004. Dr. Arora was the Principal Investigator for several projects sponsored by agencies like AICTE, Deptt. of Biotechnology (DBT), Ministry of Information Technology (MIT), Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), the National Highway Authority of India and University Grants Commission.

He was a member of the delegation that visited selected libraries and library science schools in Germany in 2002. He was a member of the delegation to Jakarta, Indonesia deputed by the Ministry of External Affairs to discuss development of INDO-ASEAN S & T Digital Library in November 2003. Dr Arora was a member of the International Library Advisory Boards of IEEE and IEE.

Dr. Arora has more than 60 research articles to his credit that were published in learned research journals and as chapters in books and conference proceedings. He has presented research papers in several national and international conferences and symposia in India and abroad.

His current research interests includes consortia-based subscription to e-resources, digital libraries, digitization of old and fragile documents and their storage, database-driven Web interfaces and Web-based library services, Web-based learning and education, scientometric analysis, etc.

H.K. Kaul is a Library and Information Specialist. He is an author, bibliographer and a knowledge expert. He has 40 years experience as a Library specialist and is the Founder Director of DELNET � Developing Library Network(estd. in 1988)

Dr. Kaul obtained first-class-first in M.L.I.S. from the University of Mumbai and Ph.D.from the University of Pune. He has received several awards, including a Senior Fellowship of the Department of Culture, Government of India. He has been a member of the Working Group on Libraries of the National Knowledge Commission, Indian National Commission for Unesco, and the member of major national committees and Advisory Board and Board of Management, National Library, Calcutta; Raja Rammohun Roy Library Foundation, Calcutta; Delhi Library Board; Committee to Review the Functioning of the Asiatic Society, National Selection Committee, Fulbright Professional Fellowships in Information Science and Technology; Scientific Advisory Committee, Ministry of Environment and Forests, Working Group on Libraries and Informatics, and Convenor, Sub-Group on Modernisation, Manpower Development, Informatics and Finance, Ninth Five Year Plan, 1997-2002.. among many other important assignments.

Dr. Kaul is an expert in Library Networking. He established DELNET, the first operational resource sharing library network in India. DELNET networks about 1500 libraries in India and six other countries and gives access to about eight million bibliographical records. Dr. Kaul�s first book came out in 1972 and since then he has authored and edited 48 books, besides over 100 research papers in the fields of library networking, bibliographical studies, history. His books include * Library Networks: An Indian Experience; Library Resource sharing and Networks; Library and Information Networking(11 vols.) *and * National Library Services.*

Pratapanand Jha is heading the Cultural Informatics of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi. He has over eighteen years of experience in project management, multimedia content creation, software design and development, telecom solutions and system integration. He has initiated many projects including Kalasampada (Digital Library of Resources of Indian Cultural Heritage), which received Golden Icon Award for Exemplary Implementation for e-Governance Initiative, under category Best Documented Knowledge and Case Study for the year 2004, from the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances, Government of India.

Other projects of National importance under him includes the digitisation of Kanjur and Tanjur manuscripts at the National Library of Mongolia, Digitisation of manuscripts at the Oriental Research Library, Srinagar and Rabindra Bhawan holdings at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan.

Dr. Mukul K Sinha is the Founder Director of Expert Software Consultants Ltd., a company involved in product development, and consultancy services in the niche area of Web services, Internet Based Applications, Mobile Applications, and Indic Languages. The company has business relations with Govt. organizations like CDAC, NIC; R&D institutions like IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Delhi, AU-KBC Center, and various other private companies.

He has been associated with various committees of Dept. of IT (DIT), Govt. of India. Specially, in the field of Indic Languages, Speech Processing, and e-Governance, and he has been associated with TDIL (Technology Development in Indian Languages) Committees of DIT since almost last fifteen years.

He is an ex-Research Scientist of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, earlier associated with IIT Delhi as External Faculty in Dept. of Computer Science, and as Visiting Scientist at Laboratory of Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge USA

Earlier he was full time researcher for almost seventeen years, in the field of Computer Science and has good number of publications in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and other referred Journals. Presently, he guides candidates for their Ph.D. theses, and till date five of his students have completed their Ph.D in the field of Software Engineering and Education Technology.

He was earlier associated as National Project Person with UNESCO for Computer Informatics Lab of Indira Gandhi National Center for Arts (IGNCA), New Delhi between 1996-99, and as Project Consultant with UNIDO, Vienna for a Nigerian Project.

He is Senior Member IEEE, and is also AICTE-INAE Distinguish Visiting Professor for AU-KBC Center, Chennai.