Meet this scientist with six patents to his credit. Call him India's Patent Man if you wish to term him so. Just a moment, the man doesn't spend hours in a R&D laboratory, but leads a professional management team at Adobe India. A gold medallist from IIT Kanpur, he went on to do his MS and PhD in computer science from the University of Maryland. His master's work on process planning got the Honorable Mention Award at AAAI conference in 1990.

His doctoral dissertation on motion vision was published and referred extensively and was also nominated for the ACM Distinguished Dissertation award in 1993. Gupta began his management career at LNK Corporation from 1989 to 1996, where he headed the Applied AI group. The work at LNK was related to the US Department of Defense and was involved in Star Wars, the Nasa Mars Probe and Brilliant Pebbles among others. In 1996, he joined Adobe Systems as a computer scientist. He was in Adobe's Corporate Research Group and conducted research in image processing and understanding, which led to six individual patents. A year later he relocated to India and was single-handedly instrumental for bringing the software major to this side of the world.

He conceived, proposed, planned and executed Adobe's India development centre. Regarding this achievement of bringing Adobe to India, he modestly says, "1997 was the beginning of that mad rush and India started to emerge as a big software hub. I feel that I was lucky to be at the right place at the right time." As for his achievements at such an early stage, he attributes it to commitment and dedication. "Eighty per cent of my time is spent on technology.

I am a hands-on person who is very close to development both with respect to program as well as strategic vision. I am a pure technologist, as hard core as one can find." His personal goals gell well with those of Adobe's in India. Long gestation periods bore him. That was one of the reasons why he left LNK Corporation. Today, he thinks of bringing out another Photoshop from scratch. His work is everything for him. He is visionary but remains practical. "Success is important to me and I have never been disappointed with failures. But, when I mean business, I am ruthless," he once said in an interview. Yes, his philosophy works well for Adobe's growth too.