Prof. D. Janakiram has took over as the Director of IDRBT on January 24, 2021.

Prof. Janakiram brings with him immense experience in various fields of direct relevance to Banking and Financial Technology. A Ph.D. from IIT Delhi, he was awarded the Boyscast Fellowship in 1997, the IBM Faculty Award in 2007 and Yahoo Faculty Grant in 2009.

He is a Board Member of Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH), Data Security Council of India (DSCI), IIIT Kurnool, and Senate Member of IIIT Trichy. He has served as Board of Studies member in several Universities including VIT University, Cochin University of Science and Technology, Anna University, Gujarat Technical University, Andhra University, SV University, JNTU, Hyderabad, JNTU, Kakinada and Academic Council member of Hindustan University.

Having authored over 150 research papers, Prof. Janakiram is the editor of six books. His books on Grid Computing (2005); Building Large Scale Software Systems (2013), and Grid and Cloud Computing (2016) are very well received. He was an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, editor of CSI Journal of Computing, Executive Council member of Cloud Innovation Council, and a fellow of Computer Society of India. He was involved in starting several conferences including the IEEE Cloud Computing for Emerging Markets (CCEM) and Urban Data Science (UDS). He has guided 14 Ph.D., over 36 M.S (Research), and 70 M.Tech. students.

He has steered many nationally-important research projects with success. He was the principal investigator for a number of projects including MobiTel: Mobile Telemedicine for rural India (Indo-German Project), Peer-to-peer Concept Search (Indo-Italian collaborative project), Service Oriented Architecture for Linux Kernel (DIT) and Cloud Bursting Architecture for Document Workflow (Xerox) and has incubated two companies in the cloud computing space.

The Minimalistic Object Oriented Linux (MOOL) developed by him and his students is being distributed by CDAC as part of the Bharat Operating System and Solutions (BOSS). BOSS MOOL has the unique distinction of supporting C++ device drivers for Linux and it also supports a number of Indian Language drivers written in C++ to support the Indian Language fonts at console level. The C++ filters which are part of MOOL operating system can be used in unique ways to harden and secure the operating system. The private cloud for machine learning application has been developed on top of MOOL operating systems and is trademarked as CloudMOOL.

The technology (MOOL) has several US patents and is licensed to Diamond Bay Technologies, an incubated company in IIT Madras Research Park. The KoreMOOL LLP start-up with licensing agreements with IIT Madras promotes the MOOL technologies globally including the secured Android operating system for mobile devices. Prof. Janakiram is also technical advisor for two Bay Area start-up companies, Quantum Ventura Inc. and Accuknox.

Prior to joining IDRBT, he was a Senior Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Madras. He was also a Visiting Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in USA.

His current research focus is on building large scale distributed systems and challenges in big data processing, along with cloud computing and blockchain technologies.