Indian-origin Stanford Professor to receive Marconi Society award

The US-based Marconi Society, dedicated to furthering scientific achievements in communications and the Internet, has conferred its Lifetime Achievement Award on Stanford University professor, Thomas Kailath.

The 82-year-old Kailath is Hitachi America Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, at Stanford University ( US) and he is the sixth recipient of the award in the Society’s 43-year history. Earlier recipients include Claude Shannon, the ‘Father of Information Theory’ and Gordon Moore of ‘Moore’s Law’ fame.

Kailath will receive his award at the annual Marconi Society Awards dinner in Summit, New Jersey on October 3, where another Indian, former Bell Labs President Arun Netravali, the ‘Father of Digital Video’, will be honoured with the $100,000 Marconi Prize.

The award recognises Kailath’s many contributions over six decades to information theory, communications, filtering theory, linear systems and control, signal processing, semiconductor manufacturing, probability and statistics, linear algebra, matrix and operator theory, which have directly or indirectly advanced modern communications technology. It also recognises his sustained mentoring and development of new generations of scientists. The Indian government conferred the Padma Bhushan on Prof Kailath in 2009.

Kailath earned a Bachelor’s degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the College of Engineering, Pune, in 1956. He then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT) in 1957. After his doctorate in electrical engineering in June 1961, the first Indian-born student to get one at MIT, he was invited by the late Prof. Solomon Golomb to join the pioneering Digital Communications Research Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In January 1963, he accepted an associate professorship at Stanford, becoming a full professor in 1968.

He served as Director of the Information Systems Laboratory from 1971 through 1980, building it into a world-leading centre for communications, control and signal processing research.

Kailath was Associate Chair of the Electrical Engineering Department Chair from 1981 to 1987 and in 1988 was appointed the first holder of the Hitachi America Professorship in Engineering at Stanford. Although Kailath became Emeritus in June 2001, he has been recalled to active duty, and he continues his research and writing activities to this day.

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