Selvam Velmurugan

Activist, Change Agent, Engineer, Entrepreneur, Filmmaker, Global soul, Idea generator, Social entrepreneur, Technologist

Passion To work in the areas of internet and software to enable meaningful changes in people's lives. Background * Founder at eMoksha.org (2008-present) o Launched VoteReport, a citizen-driven election-monitoring platform, in India, Lebanon and Afghanistan o Launched FixOurCity, a local civic management platform, in Chennai (India) o Organized the first Democracy Camp in India in June 2009 * Development Manager at Amazon.com (2004-08) o Managed Amazon Web Services Platform teams in Seattle and Bangalore o Setup Amazon Chennai Development Center and core-member of the center thought-leadership team o Managed Online Monitoring team (15 engineers and 1 program manager) o Managed Search Infrastructure and Browse Assignment teams (8 engineers) * Software Engineer at Amazon.com (1998-2004) o Conceptualized, designed and implemented a Single Index to unite vastly disparate schemas o Led the design and implementation of a generic Search platform to support Amazon Marketplace o Designed and implemented complex clustering algorithms in Search o Led the first data center migration process for Search within Amazon o Built the Universal Product Finder and Product Spider using Alexa's huge web-archive * Software Engineer at Intel (1997-98) o Optimized open-source PNG library and Speech Recognition applications for MMX o Built POC for on-demand compression/decompression of large documents over the network Academics * MS in CS from University of Georgia (1995-97) o Research Assistant in Large Scale Information and Distributed Systems Lab o Master's Thesis under Dr.Amit Sheth, founder of LSDIS and CTO of Semagix * BS in CS from College of Engineering, Guindy (1991-95) Other * Core member of the Tsunami Relief team at Amazon that collected USD 15MM+ for relief efforts. * Certified film-maker from University of Washington in Seattle and Director of a short-film. * Founding member of SITForce (Social IT Force) - an organization to help the IT needs of NGOs around the world. Worked with Digital Partners in Redmond to help identify ways to build self-sustaining kiosks in India. * Former president of the Seattle Tamil Sangam, a community of 1000+ South Asians in and around the Seattle area.

using technology to enable awareness and participation for better communities and stronger democracies.

A snippet from Bernard Lietaer's interview forcing a re-think of current monetary systems. "I have come to the conclusion that greed and fear of scarcity are in fact being continuously created and amplified as a direct result of the kind of money we are using. For example, we can produce more than enough food to feed everybody, and there is definitely enough work for everybody in the world, but there is clearly not enough money to pay for it all. The scarcity is in our national currencies. In fact, the job of central banks is to create and maintain that currency scarcity. The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive. Money is created when banks lend it into existence. When a bank provides you with a $100,000 mortgage, it creates only the principal, which you spend and which then circulates in the economy. The bank expects you to pay back $200,000 over the next 20 years, but it doesn't create the second $100,000 - the interest."

People development, Social Entrepreneurship, Software Design and Architecture