Kalyan Gupta is an entrepreneur, AI scientist, and inventor with a gift for developing multidisciplinary solutions that measurably outperform the state-of-the-art.
Spanning over three decades, he has founded three companies, published seven patents, and authored over 50 technical publications across various topics in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning(ML) and information systems andhe is still going strong!
“I spend a lot of time thinking about elegant and simple solutions to complex problems,” said Kalyan.
He loves sharing his energy and optimism with young professionals, aspiring entrepreneurs, and inventors, encouraging them to step out of their comfort zone and take charge of making the world a better place. He cares deeply about using technology for the betterment of human-kind.
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Professional
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Competencies
Kalyan is a serial entrepreneur: he has founded three companies and was a founding member of a fourth. For every company he founded, he created an ecosystem where excellence, research, and innovation thrive, infusing its DNA with values that ensure happy customers, employees, and suppliers. He is known for a unique leadership style of management by maxims.

In 2023, Kalyan started Karya Pravah to develop and commercialize Taskport, an AI-ML powered app that radically simplifies task management and collaboration for families and teams, helping them balance their home and work lives.  

In 2006, he founded Knexus Research Corp., a small business exemplifying the art-of-the-possible by delivering next-generation decision automation solutions and privacy protecting technologies to federal and commercial customers.

In August 2003 Lurie Investments acquired Knexus to accelerate its growth and expand its reach into the wider federal and commercial space. Kalyan currently serves as the VP of Research.

In 1998, he founded Terus Technologies, a text mining company, and he developed ML techniques to harvest the knowledge buried in the text documents. Kalyan was a decade ahead of the industry, and even academia, in working on this technology, which consequently limited its commercialization. To address the challenges in textual information extraction, he returned to full-time research at the Naval Research Laboratory in 2000.

In 1996, he became a founding member of CaseBank Technologies, a company that sought to commercialize experience-based reasoning (an AI technology that mimics human problem solving) for maintaining and troubleshooting aircrafts and other heavy equipment.

Kalyan has been passionate aboutdecision sciences, automation, AI and ML since the late 80s. Driven by a very practical problem, he tirelessly conducts a deep methodical inquiry into any and every topic he needs to master to solve the problem at hand.

Kalyan believes in figuring out novel, elegant problem formulations, and enjoys challenging the status quo. His topics of interest are wide-ranging: perception, reasoning, learning, cognitive architectures, linguistics, ergonomics, or gas dynamics.

For example, he devoted a decade to deeply understand multiple facets of linguistic phenomena and semantics of English prepositions, new word formation, and meaning modulation. He used his insights and findings to develop computation modules that autonomous systems could use to robustly understand commands in a human-like manner. This work led to three patents and many peer review publications in AI Journals and conferences.

Along the way, he also developed a morphotactic parser, an algorithm that reliably breaks down a word into its component lemmas, suffixes, and prefixes. Likewise, collaborating with the Naval Research Laboratory he made seminal contributions to the topic of probabilistic relational learning, which he then used to track small boats at long distances with greater accuracy under challenging lighting conditions.

Kalyan’s scientific contributions spark many of his own inventions. With his incessant drive for creating lasting practical solutions, he is never satisfied with a pen and paper exercise, but rather takes a hands-on approach, where he implements and engineers a software solution, rigorously testing and ironing out the kinks until his inventions robustly outperform the state-of-the art.

To date,he has seven published US patents on various topics, such as a new method for industrial strength conversational case-based reasoning, high performance extraction of acronyms and their expansions, and temporal expressions understanding.

Kalyan is a gifted and accomplished software and solutions architect. Thanks to his diverse background in disciplines ranging from mechanical engineering to AI and business management, he has an unusual ability to quickly grasp enterprise requirements and map them into a solution architecture that materially impacts the key performance indicators.

He has architected over three dozen software systems, APIs, tools and workbenches for various enterprise customers, ranging from human resources, finance, to AI and ML systems for autonomous systems, modeling and simulation, wargaming, and command and control.

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Values
Excellence
Pursue excellence: chase the last grain of rice in your lunch box.
Integrity
Interact with everyone with utmost sincerity, integrity, and respect.
Dependability
Strive for a reputation of unfaltering dependability in delivering products and service of exceptional quality, on schedule, and within budget.
Empathy
Empathize with end users to genuinely understand their needs and develop effective solutions with them in mind.
Courage
Fearlessly innovate to transcend the-state-of-the-art, even your own; stand behind your optimism with an even greater measure of grit.
Collective Intelligence
Trust in the power of teamwork and divergent thinking to develop robust, lasting solutions to tough problems.
Enjoyment
Create and sustain a environment where research and innovation thrive, and are a constant source of purpose, enjoyment, and fulfillment.
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Education

Sep. ’90 - Apr. ’96
Ph.D. Business Administration (Management Science and Information Systems.)
McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sep. ’86 - Jan. ’88
Master of Technology Industrial Management
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India
Sep. ’81- Aug. ’86
Bachelor of Engineering Mechanical
National Institute of Technology, Raipur, India
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Professional Journey

20 s
  • Founder & President, Karya Pravah LLC, embarked into building an app to simplify collaboration with AI an ML
  • Vice President, Knexus Research LLC
  • Sells Knexus Research Corp to Lurie Investments
  • Grows Knexus to 25 employees strong and establishes leadership with AI and privacy technologies with federal agencies
10 s
  • Knexus named among the top 25 AI companies by CIO Magazine
  • Leads and grows Knexus as a premier small business conducting basic and applied AI ML research for the Navy, and the DoD.
00 s
  • Knexus moves to National Harbor, MD, and grows to 10 employees
  • Knexus is the overall winner of the first AAAI Video Competition
  • Founder & President, Knexus Research Corp. started out of his home in Virginia
  • Chief Scientist, Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Advanced Engineering and Sciences, ITT Industries, Alexandria, VA, USA.
90 s
  • Founder, Terus Technologies, started out of family home in Brampton, Canada
  • Director of Research, CaseBank Technologies, Brampton, Ontario, Canada
  • Lecturer, Information Systems, DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University
80 s
  • Enterprise IT Consultant, ICI, WB India
  • Management Services Engineer, BEML