Sriganesh Madhvanath, PhD

Sriganesh "Sri-G" Madhvanath is the founder of Ontologie Labs, an AI startup focused on knowledge representation and intelligent infrastructure for next-generation retail discovery and agentic commerce.

Previously, he was Senior Director of Applied Research and Engineering at eBay where he led global teams developing AI-powered recommendations, personalization, and discovery experiences at scale. His organization brought together applied research, machine learning, and engineering to deliver innovations in deep learning, recommender systems, ranking, and generative AI, contributing significantly to eBay's commerce and advertising businesses.

Sri-G has more than two decades of experience spanning industrial research, technology innovation, and product development. Before eBay, he held research and leadership positions at IBM Almaden Research Center, Narus, HP Labs, Xerox PARC/Webster Research Center, and Conduent Labs. His work has spanned machine learning, data science, human-computer interaction, pen computing, multimodal interfaces, and intelligent user experiences.

His current interests include agentic AI, generative AI, knowledge representation, intelligent information discovery, and human-AI interaction, particularly the ways in which AI is transforming how people interact with information, products, and digital services.

Sri-G received his PhD in Computer Science from the University at Buffalo in 1997 and his BTech in Computer Science from IIT Bombay. He has authored over 100 refereed publications, is an inventor on more than 50 patents, and contributed to the W3C InkML standard.

He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist, IEEE Senior Member, IAPR Life Member, and a founding member of HCI India. His contributions to innovative technologies and products have received recognition from the Wall Street Journal, NASSCOM, and the Digital Empowerment Foundation.

Education

• PhD, Computer Science, University at Buffalo, 1997