Venkat is an accomplished professional with over ten years of data-mining experience in academic and corporate environments. As a Business Analyst at Terra Lycos, he was responsible for initiating and leading several large-scale data mining projects involving ad targeting, customer profiling, content integration and network management. He spearheaded a network-wide CRM/Predictive Analytics initiative called HotLinks and helped launch a state-of-the-art large-scale data warehouse to support direct marketing and cross-selling efforts across the 120 Terra Lycos properties.

Venkat was also responsible for leading the development of a novel text mining and information extraction system, called Newsmine, to dynamically mine news feeds and cross-link contextually relevant and related content from various online Terra Lycos destinations. He also developed a hybrid Bayesian and Neural Networks based kid-safe document filtering system called SearchGuard to filter adult, hate and violence content from the Lycos main search catalogs. The SearchGuard technology is also being used to support the award winning LycosZone, a popular online content destination for children. Prior to Lycos, Dr. Kolluri was at Wisewire, an Internet start-up company, researching agent-based technologies to help commercialize collaborative and content-based filtering for the web.

Venkat holds a Ph.D. in Information Science from University of Pittsburgh, a Masters degree in Industrial Engineering from Lamar University, Texas, and a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from J.N.T. University, India. He authored several technical papers and developed a patent-pending graph-theoretic algorithm to mine relations between internet objects.