Biography

Abdur Chowdhury is the CEO and co-founder of Aura Home, a software company specializing in digital photo frames that allow families to share pictures from anywhere. He cares most about building things that connect people. In his 30+ year career, Abdur has launched over 25 commercial products and worked on solving big, tech problems from scaling to spam. BBC dubbed him the “Father of Trending” as the Co-founder of Summize where he created a way to organize real-time opinions on the internet, a technology that merged with and became the foundation for Twitter in 2008. Abdur then became Twitter’s first Chief Scientist where he continued to build out the company’s search, trends and recommendation functions. 

During the early to mid-2000s, Abdur served as the Chief Architect for Search at AOL and held other positions at IIT Information Retrieval Lab, the Georgetown Computer Science Department, and University of Maryland's Institute for Systems Research. An academic at heart, he has been published in more than 100 scientific publications and holds over 50 patents. In 2010, he co-founded the Alta Vista School. In his spare time, Abdur practices martial arts, skis with his family, and reads books that make him smile.