Work Experience 

10+ years experience comprising Global Product Management (consumer Internet), Software development (enterprise s/w, embedded systems), Global R&D Team management (Machine Learning, Personalization, Info visualization/UI), in Internet & Consumer Electronics industries

Currently I am Director of Product Management in Yahoo! Search managing a new P&L in Search Platforms.

Previously I was Director of Search Relevance & Group Manager for Quality Metrics at Ask.com in Search Product Management. I was in charge of search relevance across many verticals (web search, blogs/rss-feeds search, and Image search in the past). I launched successfully multiple products over the years: Edison Algorithm (rewrite of Ask.com web search ranking/relevance algorithms), Vertical search improvements (TV, Events, Health, Entertainment celebrities, etc.), BlogSearch on Ask.com and Bloglines.com, Zoom (Related Search) for Web and Image Channels, Web Answers (mining out answers to user questions from unstructured data pages), and numerous improvements for web and image search relevance.

Prior to Ask.com, I worked at IBM where I developed technology and product positioning strategy for WebSphere Studio and WebSphere Portal. I did a lot of coding on J2EE framework, Javascript using Eclipse.

Prior to IBM majority of my career was spent at Philips Research Labs leading a research team in developing  information visualization (TV program guides) and personalization (data-mining, machine learning based algorithms) software for PVRs / Tivo-like digital set-top boxes. Our team won awards for Technical Excellence; we published several papers in international conferences (AAAI-2000, CHI-2002, User Modeling 2001, 2002), wrote 2 book chapters, and have been awarded dozens of patents (I hold 12 US Patents to-date).

Even earlier I was at a post-production, special effects company called Manhattan Transfer in New York city developing photo-realistic 3D graphics software. I worked on Maya, Alias, Softimage writing shaders, plugins in C, C++ on SGI-Irix boxes.

Education 

• MBA from NYU-Stern: 2000-2002
• MS in Computer Science from UMBC: 1995-1997
• MS in Mechanical Engineering from U of Delaware: 1992-1995
• B.Tech in Aerospace Engineering from IIT-Madras: 1988-1992

Awards

Recepient of Distinguished Alumni Award 2006 from University of Delaware. http://www.me.udel.edu/alumni/celebration06.html

Holder of 12 US Patents.

Group Award for Technical Excellence at Philips Research - 2000.

Special Merit Award for Product Delivery and Leadership - 2002. 

Press

• Video of an Invited Talk I gave at Recommenders 06 Conference in Bilbao, Spain (Sep. 2006) — Search Engines and Personalization: http://blog.recommenders06.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/2kaushalkurapati.wmv
• My blog posting on the  Blog & Feed Search Launch (June 2006): http://blog.ask.com/2006/06/theres_blogs_an.html 
• Walt Mossberg’s raving review on Ask.com and Zoom Related Search (my product): http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20060330.html
• Distinguished Career Alumni Award, 2006, University of Delaware: http://www.me.udel.edu/alumni/ABCC2006/Distinguished%20Career%20Alums.pdf 
• I was featured in the IIT-Madras Alumni Newsletter, Sep. 2005: http://www.iitmaa.org/journeys/issue2_0509/alumni07.htm 
• My Ask.com blog posting on Zoom related search: http://blog.ask.com/2005/06/the_future_pres.html
• Ask.com blog posting on another of my products, Web Answers: http://blog.ask.com/2005/05/were_not_just_f.html
• My blog post on doubling of Ask Picture Channel traffic: http://blog.ask.com/2005/05/looking_good_.html 
• My Jeeves Guy exposed blog posting: http://blog.ask.com/2005/02/jeevesguy_expos.html
• My TV recommender work quoted in Chicago Tribune, August 2000: http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~ksk227/ChicagoTribuneArticle.html