Dr. Umesh Bellur is a Professor of Data Science at the University of California San Diego and one of the leading academic voices in the areas of distributed systems, cloud computing, blockchain, and federated AI. He is also a technical advisor to Arrcus Inc in San Jose, with deep research insight into the next generation of networking technologies.
Before coming to UC San Diego, Dr. Bellur served for more than two decades at IIT Bombay, where from 2003 until 2025 he was Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. From 2019 until 2022, he led the department, developing academic strategy, growing its research portfolio, and cultivating industry relations. He has published over a hundred peer-reviewed papers in international venues and invented eight US patents.
Besides academic pursuits, Dr. Bellur has considerable entrepreneurial experience. He co-founded Collation Inc. in 2000, raised $6M of venture funding from Prism Venture Partners and Lightspeed Ventures, and was later acquired by IBM in 2003. This combination of research depth and early-stage company building gives him a very pragmatic view of how advanced technologies transition to real-world products and enterprise systems.
His governance experience encompasses board-level roles at Dena Bank and NPCI, while he presently is on the board of CDSL as an Independent Director, bringing in perspectives on technology infrastructure, risk, and large-scale financial systems.
With Dr. Bellur, one gets a broad view of Distributed Computing across academia, entrepreneurship to board leadership, and its impact on both digital and financial ecosystems.