Rochester Engineering Society Awards Venkatesh Rao from Xerox the Kate Gleason Young Engineer of the Year Award

The Rochester Engineering Society named Venkatesh Rao, a member of Research & Technology Staff at the Xerox Research Center Webster, the Kate Gleason Young Engineer of the Year award.

Presented at the Society’s 107th Annual Gala, the Kate Gleason Young Engineer of the Year Award is presented to a distinguished up-and-coming leader in the Rochester community. The award is given to engineers 34 years of age or younger and highlights achievements in education, employment, professional, and public service activities. Rao was selected based on his technical engineering achievements; involvement in multidisciplinary professional societies and technical societies; civic, community, and humanitarian activities; college education and achievement; and professional experience and business acumen.

As part of the nominating process, lab manager Lisa Purvis wrote “to those who work with and know Rao, it’s not surprising that he is the recipient of this year’s award. His innovative and creative spirit combined with his deep engineering technical background in the area of control systems and his vast experience in business and software development is a winning combination.”

“Currently he is leading Web 2.0 projects including understanding and advancing the state of the art in the semantic web, social and collaborative web, as well as rich internet applications for Xerox,” added Purvis. “His work entails assessing emerging technology spaces, creating valuable technology options for Xerox, defining new business models with the ultimate goal of creating new products and services for Xerox.”

Commenting on Venkat’s award, Steve Hoover, VP of Xerox Research Center Webster said, “We are incredibly proud of Venkat’s accomplishments as well as all of the young engineers at Xerox. This marks the second year in a row that a Xerox young engineer has won this award and it is a testament to the world class talent that has come to Rochester to join Xerox and to the impacts that they have had during their short tenure. Venkat and our other young engineers are literally the future of Xerox – they are already providing innovations across a wide variety of domains from greener printing processes to new services offerings that literally make the future today. My heartfelt congratulations to Venkat for this well-deserved recognition. I have had the chance to work with him on some of his innovations and he is truly a rare breed – a creative spirit with a wide ranging and free-wheeling intellect who delivers results.”

Rao has 19 peer-reviewed publications in journals and conferences, and 5 patent applications in progress. He has been invited to blog about his research and enterprise 2.0 insights at both local and national scales. His ability to provide keen insights into technology trends and opportunities is recognized in numerous articles published about Rao himself as well as his Ribbonfarm blog.

Rao is an innovation champion working Xerox's open innovation initiatives with the external technical community.

Before coming to Xerox, Rao was a postdoc at Cornell University working on multiagent command and control research for the Air Force for 2.5 years, and then part of the startup team for the successful online community, Sulekha.com. Rao received a Russi Modi Fellowship for undergraduate studies at India Institute of Technology where he received his B.S., a Telluride Fellowship at the University of Michigan where he received his M.S. and Ph.D, and a SIGART/AAAI/IJCAI Doctoral Consortium Fellowship.