Omkar Deshpande

I got my Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 2002, followed by Masters (2005) and Ph.D (2008) in Computer Science from Stanford University, where I was a Stanford Graduate Fellow. I was a part of the Batzoglou lab, and I worked with Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marc Feldman on using simulations to build and test models for ancient human migrations. Our simulation work on the genetic prehistory of humans supports a Serial Founder Effect out of Africa. I also worked with Deborah Rogers on agent-based simulations of egalitarian and hierarchical societies to explore how inequality spread in early human history.I then worked on building and maintaining graph-based ontologies for text mining and categorization at Kosmix (now called @WalmartLabs after being acquired by Walmart).EdTech remains my primary passion. I designed Odyssey, a Next Generation Science game at The Young Socratics, an education company that I co-founded for providing a historical-philosophical perspective to math and science topics in the middle and high school curriculum. Odyssey had a successful Kickstarter, and is now available for download on Steam.