Infinite Possibilities SCS Alum Makes Technology That Works for Everyone
Marylee WilliamsTuesday, October 28, 2025Print this page.
Even in some of the most remote parts of the world, someone who needs directions can pull up Google Maps and figure out how to get from point A to point B. And they can thank a Carnegie Mellon University alumnus for the swift route to their destination.
Lalitesh Katragadda, who earned his doctorate from the Robotics Institute (RI), has spent his career using technology to make a world that works for everyone. On Thursday, Oct. 30, he'll share his experience with the CMU community during the Bruce Nelson Memorial Lecture.
Katragadda graduated from CMU with the words of two influential professors stuck in his head. Raj Reddy, the Moza Bint Nasser University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, gave him a directive: Go out and make technology for those in need.
"Raj used to tell me about this future where technology would transform people into supermen or superwomen," Katragadda said. "We are starting to see the beginnings of that with so much available at our fingertips. But Raj also said that the people who don't have access to technology will be underserved. The differences will be stark, and we cannot let an entire section of the world be left behind."
Red Whittaker, the Founders University Research Professor Emeritus in RI, also gave Katragadda words to live by: "If you haven't done everything, you haven't done anything."
After CMU, Katragadda took Reddy and Whittaker's advice to heart and spent a career working to make technology accessible to everyone. He co-founded Google's first international engineering center and launched Google Maps India. But to create reliable maps across all communities, Katragadda had to use crowdsourcing. Google Map Maker allowed people to contribute to and edit maps for their communities, adding businesses or roads that weren't digitally available at the time.
"The ability for large numbers of people and machines to work together and synthesize the community's intelligence into a single canvas is crowdsourcing," he said. "When people ask me what Map Maker is, I say, 'It's simple. It's billions of people, one canvas.'"
Katragadda eventually retired as the head of Google's India products to focus on community-centered technological initiatives. In 2016, he founded Indihood, a crowdsourced platform generator that aims to help communities build and evolve their own platforms, solving hyperlocal socioeconomic problems.
This commitment to solving community-focused problems solidified at CMU, but started when Katragadda was young. His classmates in grade school came from all backgrounds, but some were left behind despite being smart and driven to succeed. He said seeing this discrepancy in work versus opportunity motivated him to create a world that worked for everyone.
In 1990, he graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay with a degree in aerospace engineering. He said he was always interested in engineering physics and computer science, but based on entrance requirements he wasn't able to major in either of those fields. By monopolizing one of the few computers in the department, however, he managed to nurture his interest in computation.
"Any assignment I was given, I would look at it from a physics and computing point of view, and then I would turn it into code," Katragadda said. "I would turn my assignments into computer models and then play with them. My teachers were confused, asking, 'Why is this person turning in computer printouts when he should be writing answers on paper?' One of my mentors came to me at the beginning of my fourth year and explained that this whole time, I had actually been interested in robotics and I didn't know it."
Once he learned about the Robotics Institute, Katragadda said he knew he wanted to attend CMU. He earned master's degrees at both Iowa State University and Stanford University before joining the RI. In Pittsburgh, Katragadda worked with Whittaker on lunar robotics, serving as the project lead for the CMU-NASA Lunar Rover Initiative. Whittaker said recent successes in CMU's rover program, including a planned 2029 MoonRanger mission, came through decades of research, effort and sheer will by many at the RI who followed in Lalitesh's footsteps.
"In the foreword to his thesis, Lalitesh laid out his vision, which was the grand adventure to put a robot on the moon," Whittaker said. "Beyond building deep technologies and the people who make them happen, this multidecadal initiative has transformed CMU into the premier spacefaring institution that it has become."
In Katragadda's thesis, he wrote that his work on robotic design was a starting point, "an undertaking that will need the hands of many to fulfill its promise." He said his experience at the RI gave him a glimpse of the future, and it's infinite.
"I call it the infinity era," he said. "The robotics discipline will create a world that is infinite in every other way except for natural resources. We are not living in a limited world anymore. We are living in a world of abundance, and that potential is clear."
Indihood hopes to bring these infinite possibilities to everyone in the world. As a platform generator, Indihood makes it significantly easier for people to create online platforms, like a digital bank, by using declarative computing rather than procedural coding. That is, telling the computer what you want rather than giving it step-by-step directions. This change makes creating platforms easier by significantly reducing the amount of code someone needs to write to make their idea a reality, but it's a big technical problem. Katragadda said CMU taught him that if you put smart and determined people into a room and give them a problem, they can find a solution together — which is what he's doing at Indihood.
Katragadda titled his upcoming talk "The Last Assignment." He said this will probably be the only talk he gives at CMU, and he plans to make it count.
"The last assignment is to create technology and products that work for all eight billion of us," he said.
Aaron Aupperlee | 412-268-9068 | aaupperlee@cmu.edu