Mrinal Ahlawat
Mrinal Ahlawat is an engineering leader at Google One, leading AI monetization for consumers. His areas of expertise include digital monetization, large-scale distributed systems, data infrastructure, and AI commercialization. He leads efforts that define the infrastructure and monetization strategy of a platform with over 150 million paying subscribers, and 200+ engineers. Before his current role, Mrinal served as a founding engineer for Google Pay India (Tez), where he pioneered the patented "Cash Mode" framework enabling secure peer-to-peer payments via ultrasonic audio.
Mrinal is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET), Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS), and a Distinguished Fellow of the Soft Computing Research Society (DFSCRS). He serves on the Program Committees for premier conferences like ECIR and ACM IUI, and as a reviewer for prestigious peer-reviewed journals such as the International Journal of Data Science and Analytics, IEEE Computing. Furthermore, he lends his expertise to judging committees for top industry awards, including the CES Innovation Awards.
Mrinal is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET), Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS), and a Distinguished Fellow of the Soft Computing Research Society (DFSCRS). He serves on the Program Committees for premier conferences like ECIR and ACM IUI, and as a reviewer for prestigious peer-reviewed journals such as the International Journal of Data Science and Analytics, IEEE Computing. Furthermore, he lends his expertise to judging committees for top industry awards, including the CES Innovation Awards.
Authored Publications
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Config Driven User Interface (CDUI) frameworks, often referred to interchangeably as
Server Driven UI (SDUI) have fundamentally altered mobile and web application development. By shifting layout and orchestration logic from compiled client binaries to dynamic
server responses, organizations bypass slow app store review cycles and ensure cross-platform
consistency. Despite its widespread adoption by industry leaders, CDUI remains underexplored in formal software engineering literature. This paper investigates the evolution of
CDUI through a hybrid methodology, combining a Multivocal Literature Review (MLR) of
grey literature from organizations including Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, Spotify, Faire, and Zalando,
with a structural artifact analysis of open-source production frameworks (Yandex DivKit,
Zup Beagle, and Spotify Hub). We introduce a taxonomy grounded in established foundational UI components and evaluate systems across three axes: Modularity, Centralization,
and Strictness. By tracing the architectural evolution from simple remote configurations to
strongly typed, Protobuf-driven contracts, our empirical artifact analysis (evaluating 570
schema commits across three repositories) demonstrates the critical magnitude of schema
governance and the complex challenge of managing “contract fragility.” We further analyze
cross-cutting concerns such as security sandboxing, “BFF Bloat,” and native accessibility
mapping, culminating in a future research agenda focused on the formal verification of UI
configurations.
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