Google mentor Rajeev Motwani dies in drowning accident

 

WASHINGTON: A much-loved StanfordUniversity professor from India who mentored and backed such sparkling SiliconValley companies as Google and

RajeevMotwani, Stanford University professor from India & Google mentor,died in a freak drowning accident at his Bay area home on Friday. (Piccourtesy: Stanford University)

Paypal died in a freak drowning accident at hisBay area home on Friday, sending the tech community into gloom. ( Watch )

Rajeev Motwani, who was bornin Jammu, grew up in Delhi, and graduated from IIT Kanpur, was found in thebackyard swimming pool of his Palo Alto home he purchased three years ago. Therewas no official word about the cause of death, but friends and local reportssaid he did not know how to swim and may have drownedaccidentally.

Paramedics were called when his body was found, and hewas pronounced dead at the scene at 12:28 p.m., according to the San MateoCounty coroner’s office. Motwani, who was only 47 and in the prime of hisacademic and professional life, leaves behind his wife, Asha Jadeja, anddaughters Naitri and Anya.

News of Motwani’s death stunned theclose-knit and well-networked Silicon Valley tech community. Messages spedthrough emails, blogs, Facebook entries, and Twitter feeds, as scores of techiesand gearheads who had thrived under his tutelage, mentorship, and affection,opened their hearts.

Among the first to record a tribute was SergeiBrin of Google, who along with his co-founder Larry Page, were Motwani’sstudents in grad school at Stanford and worked closely with him as they foundedGoogle. In his first blog entry in nine months, Brin recalled Motwani’s''big role in my research, education, and professionaldevelopment.''

''In addition to being a brilliant computer scientist,Rajeev was a very kind and amicable person and his door was always open. Nomatter what was going on with my life or work, I could always stop by his officefor an interesting conversation and a friendly smile,'' Brin wrote, in acondolence that ended with a stirring epitaph: ''Today, whenever you use a pieceof technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behindit.''

Brin recalled that when his interest turned to data mining,Rajeev, who had specialized in the field, helped to coordinate a regular meetinggroup on the subject. ''Later, when Larry and I began to work together on theresearch that would lead to Google, Rajeev was there to support us and guide usthrough challenges, both technical and organizational. Eventually, as Googleemerged from Stanford, Rajeev remained a friend and advisor as he has with manypeople and startups since.'' he wrote.

Motwani moved to the U.S inthe mid-1980s, taking the familiar route from IIT (Kanpur) to University ofCalifornia (Berkeley), where he earned his doctorate, before moving to StanfordUniversity. As a Stanford professor, he also served as the director of graduatestudies for the computer science department and founded the Mining Data atStanford project (MIDAS), positions from which he mentored many start-ups andwas a major catalyst in the Silicon Valley eco-system.

Although hewas primarily a theoretician, Silicon Valley gurus credit Motwani with having aprofound impact on products and companies. Michael Arrington, a serialentrepreneur and founder of the blog TechCrunch said Brin and Page always gaveMotwani significant credit for helping them create what would eventually becomeGoogle.

In fact, Arrington recalled, it was a 1998 paper called''What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket'' by Brin, Motwani, Page and TerryWinograd that became the basis for Google. In the paper, the quartet said theyintended to ''take advantage of the link structure of the Web to produce aglobal 'importance' ranking of every web page.'' They said this ranking, calledPageRank, helps search engines and users quickly make sense of the vastheterogeneity of the World Wide Web.

But early search engines thatwere off the blocks before Google scoffed at the idea. AltaVista, the leadingsearch engine at the time, turned down the chance to buy Google for $1 million,saying spam would make PageRank useless. Yahoo also declined to purchase Google,supposedly because they didn’t want to focus on search, which only sentusers away from Yahoo.com.

To Shivanand Kanavi, a Mumbai-basedbusiness writer who interviewed Motwani in 2004 for his book From Sand toSilicon: The Amazing Story of Digital Technology, the Stanford savant explainedthe birth of Google. ''Sergey Brin and Larry Page were running a search engineout of Stanford,'' he recalled. ''These 21- year-olds would come in and makedemands on me -- we need more disk space because we are crawling the Web and itsgetting bigger, we need to buy more disk... I’d give them more money andthey’d go buy more disks.

''At some point these guys said, wewant to go do a company. Everybody said you must be out of your minds. There arelike 37 search engines out there and what are you guys going to do? And how areyou going to raise money, how will you build a company, and these two guys said,we’ll just do it and they went off and did it. And there are some bignames who supported the company in its early stages. And then they took over theworld.

''And right now, you know, other search engines do not evencompare. It is just amazing. Just feels like a part of a little bit of historyand I contributed a little bit to that history. Now I have become a start-upjunkie.''

 

From

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/NEWS/World/US/Google-mentor-Rajeev-Motwani-dies-in-drowning-accident/articleshow/4627659.cms

 

 

More information about Rajeev Motwani

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajeev_Motwani