Flipkart hires Google's Krishnendu Chaudhury to head image sciences

Chaudhury will lead charter of computer vision and image processing technology across Flipkart's platforms

Google Research’s former executive Krishnendu Chaudhury has been appointed the head of Image Sciences at online e-commerce marketplace Flipkart on Thursday. Chaudhury will work with Head of Engineering Peeyush Ranjan.

He will lead the charter of computer vision and image processing technology across Flipkart’s platforms, to disrupt the traditional manner in which consumers shop online, the company said in a statement.

Chaudhury’s appointment comes in the backdrop of other high profile hiring the company has seen recently. It hired Silicon Valley veteran Eric Lange as vice-president of product management. Lange joined from Yahoo!, where he was vice-president of product management in the ads division.

On Tuesday, Myntra, which was acquired by Flipkart early last year, had appointed Mckinsey & Company’s former director Ananth Narayanan as its chief executive officer. Last week, former Google senior executive Ambarish Kenghe was hired as new senior vice-president and head of product at Myntra. 



Prior to his new stint, Chaudhury worked with the Machine Intelligence team of Google Research at their Mountain View campus in California. Chaudhury has an experience of 10 years working with Google where he led the team that created Google Newspaper Search as well as WebP, Google's open source still image compression technology. He also has an experience of working with Adobe Systems for 9 years. 

At Flipkart, Chaudhury’s expertise will be used in developing technology that enables computers to understand higher levels of abstractions, which will impact purchasing decisions.

Ranjan, Head of Engineering, said, “Image science has the potential to revolutionize the way in which information is consumed. From customers searching for products ‘visually’ to our sellers uploading their inventory on our platform through one picture, it is all possible today with ‘computer vision’ or deep learning technology. The charter of Krishnendu’s team is to make this very vision a reality.” 

“Flipkart, with its daring, groundbreaking ideas, excites me in many ways. In particular, creating a division that is focused on image processing and computer vision is a pioneering notion for a company in India,” said Krishnendu.