He received his Ph.D. in 2000 from Stanford University under the supervision of Rajeev Motwani. Before that, he obtained his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. His research interests are in approximation algorithms, metric embeddings and algorithmic techniques for large data sets. His work on dimension reduction in l1 won the best paper award at FOCS 2003. A one year stint in the research group at Google gave him an opportunity to apply his theoretical ideas in the real world. He still reaps the benefits of that experience -- he has successfully managed to retain the top spot for a Google search on his last name, but has wisely given up trying to compete with his well-known namesake for searches on his first name.