Month: August 2021

Dr. Shankar Sastry did his B.Tech at IIT Bombay where he received the President of India medal. He did his M.S. EECS in 1979, M.A. Mathematics in 1980, and Ph.D EECS at University of California, in 1981.nnnDr. Sastry was Assistant Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before joining the University of California, Berkeley, where presently he is Director ERL and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Dr. Sastry has had the opportunity of working as Professore A Contratto at Universita di Pisa, Gordan Mckay Professor at Harvard University and visiting Vinton Hayes Professor at MIT.nnnHis other professional experience includes the position of Directeur Recherche, Center Nationale Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Toulouse, France, Summer 1991.

Mr. Shashikant D. Limaye, in a distinguished career with the Indian Railways has made outstanding contributions to major infrastructural engineering projects in the country. He joined the Western Railway in 1975 as Asst. Engineer and at present works in the higher echelon of the management of Western Railway, as Divisional Railway Manager, Ajmer, Managing the entire gamut of the division earning Rs. 900 crores per annum with 16,000 employees on roll.nnHis major contribution in the field of Civil engineering came during his 7 1/2 years stint with the Konkan Railway Corpn. Ltd. (KRCL). Since its early stages in 1990 till 1994 as Chief Engineer (Designs) and thereafter as Chief Engineer (Coordination) till January 1998, he was closely associated in vital planning, designing and implementation activities of the KRCL a megaproject of Indian Railways comprising construction of 760 km, broad guage railway line. With an estimated cost of Rs.2400 crores it involved construction of 179 major bridges, 92 tunnels and 90 million cu-m earthwork.nnDuring the year 1988 he held charge of the post of Chief Track Engineer on the South Eastern Railway at Calcutta. In that capacity he managed the large fleet of on – track machines meant for maintenance & relaying of track effectively and improved their productivity by as much as 50%.nnFrom 1983 to 1989 he also worked in the capacity of Professor (Bridges) in the prestigious Indian Railways Institute of Civil Engineering at Pune. During this tenure he held appointment as Dy. National Project Director on a UNDP Project for development of Indian Railways Institute of Bridge Engineering Pune.n

Mr. Kanwal Rekhi is a prominent international personality in the field of venture capital and entrepreneurship development. Mr. Rekhi was a student at IIT Bombay and did his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering in 1967 and obtained his MS in Electrical Engineering from Michigan Tech in 1969.nnAfter working for some years in emerging areas of technology, he founded Excelan in 1982, a network technology company that introduced some pioneering products. Excelan went public in 1987 and merged with Novell in 1989. Kanwal joined the Board of Directors of Novell and was named an executive vice-president and CTO of the company.n

Mr. Anuvrata K. Roy, universally known as Dunu Roy, has played the role of an engineer away from the beaten track. His work has been path breaking as it has shown how an engineer who works at grassroots level needs to combine understanding of social, cultural, environmental issues with technological issues.nnEven while at IIT, Dunu and a group of fellow-students were engaged in trying to assess how their knowledge could help in solving problems of the poor. For this, they started work in villages near Bombay.nDunu’s major contribution came in his work at Shahdol, M.P. He first went to Shahdol as a part of a team of students from IIT Bombay and IIT Kanpur to study the impacts of the paper mill located at Amlai near Shahdol. He shifted to a small town called Annupur and started a small motor repairing workshop as a way of getting to meet the local people. This workshop metamorphosed into the ‘Vidushak Karkhana. A few more people joined Dunu and the Shahdol Group came into being a start a community living experiment. One of the most significant studies carried out by the Group was the regional environment planning study, which actually was a study encompassing the history, resource base, culture etc. of the area, and evolved a development plan based on this.nnThe Shahdol Group emerged as a major centre of intellectual thought on these issues, and became a centre attracting visitors- Students, academics, activists, journalists – not only from all over India, but also from all over the world.nnIt is a centre which broke new ground and tread new paths, setting in motion innovative methods of intellectual inquiry and social activism, and has become an important landmark in the history of the social, environmental, people-oriented movements in India. Even today, the Vidushak Karknana is active, and Dunu continues to guide it.n

A national merit scholar, Mr. Achyut S. Godbole stood 16th in the SSC Board Examination and won first prize in the state of Maharashtra both in Maths and Arithmetic.nnnHe has worked for over 26 years in the software industry in India, UK and USA. Mr. Godbole was instrumental in building two companies viz., PCS and Syntel from their original small strengths to about 600 each. He has been involved in software marketing worldwide.nnnHe is currently the Chief Executive of L&T Information Technology Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of L& T Ltd. Mr. Godbole has transformed it from a cost centre to a profit centre. The professional strength of LTITL has increased from 500 to 800 and the company’s sales turnover has grown to Rs. 91 crores from Rs. 54 crores within a year of his entry.

Dr. Vivek S. Borkar ranks among the top practioners of control theory world wide. His contribution to the theory of stochastic control is profound and broad, and some of his results on adaptive control are the most general available today.nnDr. Borkar is professor in the Department of Theoretical Computer Science at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai since 1999 and was earlier with the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He has held visiting faculty positions at prestigious institutions such as Technische Hogeschool Twente, M.I.T., USA, University of Maryland, Scoula Normale Superiore, Pisa, and University of Califor nia, Berkeley.n

Dr. Sudhir P. Mudur has made outstanding contribution through teaching and research in the field of computer graphics and information technology. He began his scientific career at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, in 1970, eaming his Ph.D. on the way. From 75-80 he was research scientist at the National Centre for Software Development and Computing Technologies in TIFR. Since 1985 he has been Head, Graphics & CAD Division at NOST, and Associate Director at NCST since 1991. Dr. Mudur has also worked in various computer graphics labs in Europe on a VN Fellowship (74-75) and was visiting Professor at Michigan State University in 1995.nnDr. Mudur has coordinated, led and successfully executed a significant number of software development oriented research projects with funding from external agencies. These links have enabled NCST to obtain substantive inputs in the form of hardware and software. These projects include: leading edge graphics research (European Commission); technology transfer in Indian languages (Microsoft); intemational software education; activity driven multimedia based training for school teachers (Intel).n

In a distinguished career with Bell Laboratories since 1979, Dr. Bharat Doshi has worked on over 200 projects. His technical leadership has been a key element in building upworld class technologies, recognised by the industrial as well as academic community. He is a Fellow of Bell Laboratories.nnDr. Doshi started at Bell Labs in 1979 as Member of the Technical Staff, rose to Technical Manager in 1983 and Director in Advanced Communications Technologies in 1994. Key responsibilities included performance, reliability, protocols, controls, SW/HW/Network architecture and integrity of new telecommunication and computing technologies and products. Besides his contribution as Director, Advanced Communications, Dr. Doshi has been involved in many task forces related to technology, product and business operation strategies. He has given innumerable keynote talks in Bell Laboratory Technology Seminars in many parts of the world.

Dr.Beheruz Sethna has served in leadership posts in University education development and management in the USA since 1989. Dr.Sethna is the first Indian-born person to become CEO of a university in the United States of America. In October 1999 Dr. Sethna was appointed as the interim senior vice chancellor of academic affairs of the University System of Georgia, USA. Since August 1994 he has served as President of the State University of West Georgia, a campus of 8,700 students. Among the many achievements he is credited with, was the launching of Georgia’s first Advanced Academy for gifted high-school students , obtaining approval for campus master plan, awarding the University’s first honorary doctorates, and the state’s first Honours College.nnDr. Sethna is a B.Tech. (1971) in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay, MBA (1973) from IIM Ahmedabad and Ph.D. (1976) in Business from Columbia University.n

Satish Agnihotri did his Masters in Physics from the Institute in 1976 and subsequently obtained an M. Tech in Environmental Sciences in 1980. He continued his quest for knowledge by acquiring another Masters’ degree in Rural Development from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK in 1992 and subsequently obtained a Doctorate from the same university in 1997 for his thesis on “Sex ratio Imbalances in the Indian Population – a Disaggregated Analysis”.nn