Woman Technologist of the Year - Krishna Paul

Krishna Paul has 24+ years of experience in embedded system design, research and development. Currently, she is a Principal Engineer and a senior technical leader at the Intel Client division. At Intel, she led multiple generations of Intel products as lead architect in several areas of system design: Low power design and optimizations, Security, Analytics and Machine Learning workload for server platform design optimizations, and Audio/Voice/Speech innovations for client architecture. She led self-driving car platform architecture in the Intel Server group. In the past, her technical specialization areas had been wireless networking and distributed algorithms.

In 17 years at Intel, Krishna has been part of technology leadership, shipping multiple products from concept to customer through high-performance team building, collaboration across industry forums, mentoring, executing and firefighting through several turns of an exciting journey. She led software engineering process improvements reducing product development and time to market that was honoured by ISQA, Intel Software Quality Award, the highest possible recognition for excellence in SW engineering at Intel. She is one of the technical leaders at Intel Bangalore and has supported site growth from 2000 to 12000 in terms of R&D manpower in the last 17 years.

Before Intel she worked as a Senior Researcher in NEC Networks laboratory in Germany, focusing on distributed system algorithms research and as Faculty of Computer Science in IIT Mumbai.

She has a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering and over 25 IEEE/ACM publications. She has served and chaired multiple technical program committees. She has been invited to speak at multiple technology conferences. She has represented Intel in numerous industry meets. She has also been the principal investigator for Intel-funded research projects with IITs and IISC. Krishna is a passionate advocate for diversity in technical leadership.

  1. Smart Sound Technology ( SST): Krishna led the development of SST at Intel which is part of all Intel platforms shipping to date. This work improved audio playback power from 1 watt to 100 milliwatts ensuring Intel’s market share remains intact in the face of competition. This created multiple fundamental innovations in SoC-based Intel PC design, including redesigning OS power management in collaboration with Microsoft.
  2. Wake on Voice ( Cortana): Krishna lead the first Intel platform that enabled a PC to recognize voice commands to bring back the system from a super low power state to a fully active system. This was instrumental in saving power without impacting system response latency and encompassed changes in several parts of system software. This technology was transferred to Microsoft which was foundational for modern Cortana that comes with every windows machine today.
  3. USB Type C system software: Krishna helped design USB Type C system software and related platform features for 1st generation USC type C IP for Intel platforms.
  4. Krishna was one of the lead platform architects who designed and developed the first Functionally safe ( FUSA level 5) platform for autonomous driving based on Intel CPU.
  5. Currently, Krishna is working on bringing AI-based Assistive features for media content creators software to the PC market.

Some of the earlier work, before intel

Summary of technology development

  1. Development of first IMS stack for 4 G cellular network at Infineon which was later adopted by Intel.
  2. Low-cost directional antenna-based wireless MAC design.

The last work was a collaboration among IIT Mumbai, IISC and IIT Chennai to develop a low-cost MAC with WiFi Phy layer along with directional antennas to provide low-cost long-range communication for emerging markets.

Ref: IEEE Communication Magazine January 2007, WiFiRe: Rural Area Broadband Access using the WiFi PHY and a New MAC, Krishna Paul, Sridhar Iyer, Bhaskar Ramamurthy, Anurag Kumar.

Societal Impact

Krishna has been actively engaged in mentoring men and women technologists inside and outside Intel over the past two decades.

Inside Intel, she spends multiple mentoring hours for the technical leadership pipeline, assisting in authoring technical papers, and patent harvesting. She has delivered multiple leadership talks that have enthused people to continue on the technical track. Especially for the women’s technical leadership, she has been able to stop leaky bucket syndrome in multiple cases.

Krishna is a Tech Council member for Intel Disability and Accessibility network ( IDAN) where she is collaborating with industry partners to make assistive technology reach the masses at a lower cost.

Krishna along with her colleagues across the semiconductor industry in Bangalore initiated a women-only deep technology conference and has been TPC chair for IEEE WinTechCon for consecutively two years 2018-2019. This has created momentum and a highly esteemed platform along with IEEE for women technologists in the local ecosystem, to showcase their work.

Krishna (along with her family) is deeply involved in supporting villagers with medical aids, at a location near her hometown. Every year she helps conduct eye camps (in collaboration with Vivekananda Mission Asram Netra Niramay Niketan, Chaitanyapur, West Bengal India) where over 5 thousand villagers are screened for eye diseases and help get medical treatment free of cost. https://www.vmannn.org/

Reference of a few Invited Talks:

  1. Title: Internals of Machine Learning –  WeConnect 2018,
  2. Title: Advancement in Autonomous Driving – IEEE HiPC 2018,
  3. Title:Intel Server Technologies – OpenCompute summit 2019, BA,
  4. Title: How Does She Do it –  VLSID 2019,
  5. Title: Challenges and State of the Art in Autonomous Driving – ICCDN 2019, IISC, BA.

Leadership Roles in career 

  1. Lead Architect, Principal ENGINEER, CCG, Intel (2020-) Responsible for Creator and Gaming business segment design innovation
  2. Lead Architect, Principal ENGINEER, DCG/DCPA, Intel (2016-2020) Responsible for server platform telemetry multi-GPU compute design optimization
  3. Lead ARCHITECT, AUDIO VOICE, SPEECH, POWER MANAGEMENT (IP ARCHITECTURE GROUP, Intel 2013-2017) Senior architecture member of core Audio, Voice, Speech (AVS) IP architecture team, lead for Audio, voice architecture for Intel personal computing platform
  4. PLATFORM ARCHITECT AUDIO VOICE, SPEECH, POWER MANAGEMENT (MCG PRODUCT GROUP, Intel (2005-2013) Lead architect for power-optimized SoC system software design focusing on audio voice speech.
  5. SENIOR ENGINEERING MANAGER, LEAD ARCHITECT, INFINEON TECHNOLOGIES (2003- 2005) Worked as the lead architect and group manager for mobile secured platforms developing features and smartphones.
  6. SENIOR RESEARCH MEMBER, NEC Network Research, GERMANY (1999-2001) Worked are Senior Networks researcher in NEC Network Laboratory (Heidelberg, Germany)
  7. INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGIES, Assistant Professor (2001- 2003) Worked as Faculty of Computer Science in IIT Bombay, India and led the network research group establishing leadership thru multiple funded research projects and research publications.