Panel Discussion

Ashok Jhunjhunwala IIT Madras	Venkatesh Sarangan Tata Consultancy Services	Srinivasan Keshav University of Waterloo

Ashok Jhunjhunwala - IIT Madras

Dr. Jhunjhunwala is an Institute Professor at IIT Madras. He received his B.Tech degree from IIT, Kanpur, and his MS and Ph.D degrees from the University of Maine. From 1979 to 1981, he was with Washington State University and has been at IIT Madras ever-since, where he leads the Telecommunications and Computer Networks group (TeNeT). The group works with industry in the development of telecom, banking, IT and Power Systems (including solar) technologies relevant to India, and has a special focus on rural technologies. It has incubated more than seventy companies in the last twenty years. He chairs IITM Incubation cell, Health Technology Innovation Center (HTIC), co-chairs Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI) at IIT Madras and is professor in-charge of IITM Research Park. He also chairs a MHRD committee called ‘Quality Enhancement of Engineering Education (QEEE)’ focused on 500 Indian engineering colleges, other than IITs and NITs.

Dr. Ashok Jhunjhunwala has been awarded Padma Shri in the year 2002. He has been awarded Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in 1998, Dr.Vikram Sarabhai Research Award for the year 1997, Millennium Medal at Indian Science Congress in the year 2000 and H. K. Firodia for “Excellence in Science & Technology” for the year 2002, Shri Om Prakash Bhasin Foundation Award for Science & Technology for the year 2004, Awarded Jawaharlal Nehru Birth Centenary Lecture Award by INSA for the year 2006, IBM Innovation and Leadership Forum Award by IBM for the year 2006, awarded Bernard Low Humanitarian Award in 2009, awarded ‘Bharat Asmita Vigyaan Tantragyaan Shresththa Award’ for the best use of Science & Technology through Innovation in 2010, and awarded Honorary Doctorates by the Institute of Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden in 2008 and University of Maine, USA in 2010. In 2010, he was also awarded JC Bose Fellowship in 2010 by DST, Government of India, awarded Dronacharya (2011) by TiE and recently awarded Top Innovator of Top 11 in 2011 Innovators Challenge. He is a Fellow of World Wireless Research forum, IEEE and Indian academies including INAE, IAS, INSA and NAS.

Dr. Jhunjhunwala is a Director in the Board of Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) Limited, Polaris, Sasken, Tejas, Tata Communications, Exicom,Mahindra Reva Electrical Vehicles Pvt Ltd and Intellect Design Arena Limited. He is also a board member of several educational institutes and section 25 companies including BIRAC. He was member of Prime Minister’s Scientific Advisory Committee from 2004-14.

Venkatesh Sarangan - Tata Consultancy Services

Venkatesh Sarangan obtained his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from College of Engineering, Guindy, Anna University in 1997. He then obtained his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, USA in 2003. After that, he was with the Computer Science department at Oklahoma State University, as an Assistant Professor and then as a tenured Associate Professor. As he was suffering from acute home sickness, he came back to Chennai and joined TCS Innovation Labs, Chennai in 2009. Since then he has been working on making infrastructures smart with frugal sensing. He has published more than 40 research papers in international conferences and journals. He has been a member of Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, and listed in the Who’s Who of students in American Universities

Srinvasan Keshav - University of Waterloo

Srinivasan Keshav is Professor and Cisco Chair in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. After undergraduate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1986, he received his PhD in 1991 from the University of California, Berkeley, with a thesis entitled Congestion Control in Computer Networks; his advisor was Domenico Ferrari. He then joined the research staff at Bell Labs; while at Bell Labs, he also had visiting faculty positions at the IIT Delhi and Columbia University. In 1996 he became an associate professor at Cornell University; He then left academia in 1999 to co-found Ensim Corporation, where he is now a member of the board of directors. In 2003, he joined the faculty at Waterloo, where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Tetherless Computing.

He is the inventor, along with his students at the University of Waterloo, of KioskNet, a system for providing internet access in impoverished countries. Keshav is the author of a textbook on computer networks, An Engineering Approach to Computer Networking. He also wrote “Mathematical Foundations of Computer Networking” in 2011. Keshav is currently the Editor of Computer Communication Review, and the Chair of ACM SIGCOMM.

Source : Wikipedia