The US-based Marconi Society has announced
its Lifetime Achievement Award to Indian-born Stanford University professor
Thomas Kailath, for his outstanding contributions to modern communications.
"Kailath is the sixth scientist to be honoured with our Lifetime
Achievement Award for his research contributions, which advanced modern
communications technologies over the last six decades," the Society said
in an e-mail to IANS on Sunday night.
The 82-year-old who was conferred the Padma Bhushan in 2009, is currently the
Hitachi American Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, at Stanford.
The society named after Nobel Laureate Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937), who
invented the radio, was set up in 1975 by his daughter Gioia Marconi Braga
through an endowment. It annually awards individuals whose scope of work and
influence emulate the principle of "creativity in service to
humanity" that inspired Marconi.
The rare honour also makes Kailath join five other recipients of the
43-year-old Society's prestigious award, including Gordon Moore of the Moore's
Law fame and father of Information Theory Claude Shannon.
The award will be presented to Kailath at the Society's Awards dinner at
Summit, New Jersey on October 3.
At the same event, it will also honour another Indian-born and former Bell Labs
president Arun Netravali, 71, with a $100,000 cash prize for his pioneering
work in digital video technology, used in smartphones and TVs.
"The award is being conferred on Kailath for mentoring a generation of
research scholars and writing a classic textbook in linear systems that changed
the way the subject is taught and his special purpose architecture to implement
the signal processing algorithms on VLSI (Very Large-sale System Integration)
chips," the Society said in the e-mail.
Kailath and his students, who together hold a dozen patents, have transitioned
a part of their research into industry and co-founded four technology firms,
including Integrated Systems in 1980 and Numerical Technologies in 1996.
Intel acquired Integrated as part of its WindRiver buy in 2009, while Synopsis
bought Numerical earlier in 2003.
"The Marconi Award is humbling and moving, as it puts me alongside
Shannon, who laid the foundation for our digital age and was one of my teachers
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), though I do not consider
being at his level," Kailath told IANS.
Born on June 7, 1935, in Pune to a Malayalam-speaking Syrian Christian family,
Kailath graduated in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Pune
in 1956. He went to the US in 1957 to join the MIT, with research assistantship
in the Information Theory Group.
He was also the first Indian-born student to be awarded a Doctorate in
Electrical Engineering by the MIT in 1961.
Kailath began his career by joining the Digital Communications Research Group
of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a federally funded research and
development centre of NASA in Pasadena, California.
He was also a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology
(Caltech) in the 1960s.
Kailath was a research guide to about 100 doctoral and post-doctoral scholars,
including Indian-born scientist Arogyaswami Paulraj, emeritus professor in
electrical engineering at Stanford, and whom the Society honoured with the
Marconi Prize in 2014 for his work on developing wireless technology to
transmit and receive data at high speed.
"Kailath has been an influential mentor to a number of Indian academics,
including me. He hosted many of us at his research group at Stanford, even in
lean times when federal funding was limited," the 72-year-old Paulraj
recalled.
Kailath and Paulraj are joint holders of the original US patent for Multiple
Input, Multiple Output technology that makes wireless networks more efficient.
"While Marconi's Award recognises Kailath's achievements at the global
level, we in India can take pride in his contributions to the country in
advanced technologies," added Paulraj.
Kailath, who maintained close links with the Bengaluru-based Indian Institute
of Science (IISc) for over three decades, was advisor to the Defence Ministry
in the 1970s for setting up research centres at the state-run Indian Institute
of Technology to support the Air Defence Ground Environment System (ADGES) plan
of the Indian Air Force (IAF).
Kailath's distinguished career earned him scores of awards and honours, notably
the National Medal of Science from former US President Barack Obama in 2012 for
transformative contributions in information and system science, mentoring young
scholars and translating scientific ideas into entrepreneurial ventures that
impacted the industry.
"Kailath has been an inspiration for generations of Indian students in
communications and information systems. Many of them were privileged to listen
to him for the first time, when he spoke at our convocation ceremony in
2011," said S. Sadagopan, Director, International Institute of Information
Technology (IIIT-B) in Bengaluru.