About

I am Hrishikesh Ballal, welcome to my website. Everyone calls me Hrishi, the H is silent so it is pronounced as ‘Reeshee’. My name, ऋषिकेश in Devanagari / Marathi has a Sanskrit origin. Rishikesh is also the name of a ancient city in the foothills of the Himalayas. You can connect with me on LinkedIn and Github and my email address is at the bottom of this page.

I am a Mechanical Engineer by training specializing in Engineering Design, Operations Research with degrees from University of Michigan and MIT. In 2015, I completed my PhD at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London with a focus on geodesign. My thesis was around early stage design and is entitled Collaborative planning with digital design synthesis.

My expertise and work in the “geo” domain has a strong mechanical / systems engineering focus. I work on three things: Geodesignhub, OpenUTM and Urjanova.

Geodesignhub is a pioneering software for maps-based mediation and negotiations about difficult social, political, spatial problems. It is commonly used in the context of public policy, infrastructure investments, tourism, environmental management, urban design, climate adaptation etc.

OpenUTM is an open source company with a mission to support current and future aerial robotics ecosystem. We have founded and lead well-established open-source project around unmanned traffic management: Flight Spotlight and Flight Blender. I also work with different stakeholders, around regulation of unmanned aviation and its integration with national and international airspace, as part of the Board of Directors for GUTMA.

Urjanova works on tools for simulation, type certification and a modern approach to nuclear power plant licencing and regulatory compliance. Our mission is to support the nuclear industry in its transition to digital operations with a focus on safety and efficiency.

I feel like I have had many lives professionally before the three companies that I actively work on. Prior to my current focus, I was working as a mechanical engineer in the automotive industry and subsequently regulatory expert on the hardware aspects of consumer electronics manufacturing and dis-assembly. It all started when I was offered a fellowship to work on solving the collection and end-of-life aspects of e-waste and it was the thesis for my degree.