A Tech trailblazer, who has overcome incredible adversity to achieve academic excellence, is now on the pathway to success, after launching a business out of Sunderland Software Centre.
Born and raised in Tamil Nadu, Dr Selvakumar Ramachandran – or Selva, as he is known – has moved his life from one that saw him crawling the streets of his home city to founding a Sunderland-based business,Kerckhoffs Ltd, that has produced a product – Identiteye – that will keep some of society’s most vulnerable safe.
Owed to a disability caused by contracting Polio as an infant, and with no wheelchairs in India to help him move freely, the 38-year-old, pushed himself to achieve a Masters degree in Software Engineering from Blekinge Tekniska Hogskola in Sweden and a PhD in Information Science from the University of Rome Tor Vergata. He has now developed Identiteye, which aims to use a specially fabricated, discreet ‘chip’, installed on the doorstep of vulnerable people, to ‘screen’ people at their door to ensure they are ‘official’ and they are who they say they are.