I+ART: Industry-Academia Research Track

Dr. Kumar Sivarajan

CTO, Tejas Networks

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Kumar received his B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras in 1987, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degree from Caltech in 1988 and 1990. He worked at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, New York, and was on the faculty of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, before co-founding Tejas Networks in 2000 as its Chief Technology Officer.

Kumar co-authored the bestselling book, “Optical Networks: A Practical Perspective” which is currently in its third edition. He received the IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Paper Award in 1997, is a distinguished alumnus of IIT Madras, a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, received the Swarnajayanti Fellowship in 2000, and the ‘CTO of the Year’ award from ET Telecom in 2022.

Dr. Jaiganesh Balakrishnan

Texas Instruments

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Dr. Jaiganesh Balakrishnan is a Principal Architect and Fellow with the Analog Signal Chain department at Texas Instruments, Bangalore. He received his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT, Madras, in 1997, and Ph. D in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University, USA, in 2002. At TI, his research has been in the field of Signal Chain Architectures, Signal Processing Algorithms and Communication Systems on technologies spanning 4G/5G base stations, radar systems, GPS/WLAN/FM transceivers, DVB-H and UWB. Jaiganesh has developed architectures/algorithms for various highly integrated high performance and low power consumption system-on-chip solutions, for wireless base stations, mobile handsets and radar systems. He holds 85+ patents and is the recipient of the 2010 TR35 Young Innovator award by MIT’s Technology Review Magazine.

Dr. Rajat Prakash

Qualcomm

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Rajat Prakash is with the Wireless R&D group at Qualcomm. His current work focuses on construction and applications of digital twins of wireless networks. He also works on Open RAN and industrial IoT for 5G. Rajat has previously worked on a wide range of topics in wireless networks, including small cells, self-organizing networks, neutral hosting, VoLTE and VoWiFi. He has participated in standards and industry bodies such as 3GPP, O-RAN Alliance, CBRS Alliance, Multefire Alliance, Small Cell Forum, 5G ACIA, IEEE and 3GPP2. Rajat obtained his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, MS from Cornell University and B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, all in Electrical Engineering.

Dr. Rohit Kapoor

Qualcomm

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Rohit Kapoor received his Bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee in 1999, and PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2003, in Computer Science in the area of Computer Networking. He joined the Wireless R&D department of Qualcomm in 2003, first located in San Diego for about 12 years and the last ~10 years in Bangalore. During his time in Qualcomm, he has been involved in the design, development, standardization and commercialization of many key technologies that are part of 3G, 4G, 5G Cellular and WLAN standards. Rohit leads Wireless R&D and Systems Engineering teams for Qualcomm in Bangalore.

Dr. Rohit Nabar

Mimosa Networks

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Rohit Nabar is currently Vice President, Software development at Mimosa Networks, a wholly owned subsidiary of Radisys/Jio Platforms. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2003, where he worked on MIMO wireless communications, wireless signal processing and communication theory. Between 2002 and 2005, Dr. Nabar served as a post-doctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, Switzerland and later as a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the Imperial College, London, UK. Since 2005, Dr. Nabar has worked in the wireless industry at Marvell Semiconductor, Cisco Systems, Lattice Semiconductor and Apple contributing to R&D, standardization and productization across a variety of wireless technologies: WLAN, Bluetooth 3G/4G and 5G NR. In his current responsibility at Mimosa Networks Dr. Nabar works on developing multi-Gbps solutions for wireless access and backhaul. Dr. Nabar's technical interests broadly span signal processing, communication theory and information theory.

Prof. Ashutosh Sabharwal

Ernest D. Butcher Professor of Engineering Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Rice University, Houston, TX

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Ashutosh Sabharwal is the Ernest D. Butcher Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Rice University. He works in two independent areas - wireless networks and digital health. His ongoing work in wireless focuses on theory and methods for joint wireless communications & imaging, as well as large-scale experimental platforms. He was one of the inventors of in-band full-duplex communications, a technology used in both wireline and wireless standards. He is the founder of the WARP project (warp.rice.edu), an open-source project used by 150+ research groups worldwide. He is currently leading several NSF-funded center-scale projects, notably Rice RENEW (renew-wireless.org), to develop an open-source software-defined massive MIMO wireless network platform. He also leads the Rice Digital Health Initiative (dhi.rice.edu); his digital health research focus is the development of devices and data science to quantify behavior-biology pathways across many diseases. He received the 2017 IEEE Jack Neubauer Memorial Award, 2018 IEEE Advances in Communications Award, 2019 and 2021 ACM Test-of-time Awards, 2019 ACM MobiCom Community Contribution Award, and 2023 ICC Best Paper Award. His research has led to multiple startups and FDA-approved products. He is a Fellow of IEEE, ACM and the National Academy of Inventors.

Prof. Bharadwaj Amrutur

Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore, India

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Bharadwaj Amrutur is a Professor in Indian Institute of Science (IISc). He chairs the Robert Bosch Center for Cyber-Physical Systems – an interdisciplinary research and academic center in IISc. He is also the Director Executive of ARTPark (AI & Robotics Technologies Park), a technology business incubatory, setup by IISc. He obtained his BTech degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Bombay in 1990 and his MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1994 and 1999 respectively. Post PhD, he worked in Silicon Valley, CA, USA after which he moved to IISc and has been a faculty there since 2004. He has received the Satish Dhawan Young Engineer Award, Abdul Kalam Technology Innovation Fellowship, IISc Alumni Award for Research Excellence and is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineers. His current research interests are in Tele-Autonomous Intelligence – where advanced communication networks along with Generative AI and Robotics can potentially transform multiple sectors.

Prof. P. Vijay Kumar

Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore, India

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P. Vijay Kumar received his B.Tech. and M.Tech. from IIT Kharagpur and Kanpur, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Southern California (USC). From 1983-2003, he was on the faculty of USC, from 2003-2021, a Professor at IISc, and since 2021, an Honorary Professor at IISc.

His current research interests include low-correlation sequences for navigation satellite systems and error-correcting codes with applications to distributed storage, low-latency communication and quantum computation. He is a recipient of the 1995 IEEE Information Theory Society Prize-Paper award and the IEEE Data Storage Best Paper Award of 2011/2012. A pseudorandom sequence family designed in a 1996 paper co-authored by him formed the short scrambling code of the 3G WCDMA cellular standard. The Indian Space Research Organization has incorporated the IZ4 family of spreading codes co-designed by him into the new civilian L1 signal of the NavIC navigation satellite system.

He received the USC School of Engineering’s Senior Research Award in 1994, the Rustum Choksi Award at IISc in 2013, and a J. C. Bose National Fellowship in 2017. He was on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 2013-15 and a plenary speaker at IEEE ISIT 2014. He is a Fellow of the INAE, IAS, and INSA Indian academies and a Fellow of IEEE.

Prof. Rajesh Zele

IIT Bombay, India

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Rajesh H Zele (Senior Member, IEEE) received the B.Tech. degree from IIT Bombay, Mumbai, India, in 1989, the M.S.E.E. degree from Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA, in 1990, and the Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, in 1994. In 2016, he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Bombay, as a Professor, after over two decades of industry experience. Before joining IIT, he was the Director at MaxLinear, Carlsbad, CA, USA, developing the next-generation CMOS RF and mixed-signal system ON chips (SoCs) for digital cable and satellite communications. He was the Vice President of Mindtree, Pune, India, leading the team for Bluetooth and short-range wireless transceivers. He founded the startup Alereon Semiconductors Pune, to develop ultrawideband radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) for wireless USB products. Before Alereon, he was the Director of Engineering at Zilker Laboratories, Austin, TX, USA, developing power management products. He established the Austin Design Center, Austin, for the startup FET and managed the technical team responsible for 10-Gb/s optical networking products. He has an extensive background in wireless transceivers at Motorola, Austin, and Plantation, FL, USA, where he was an Integrated Circuit (IC) Design Manager for the Talk- About radio platform. He has co-authored over 25 articles and a book chapter. He holds eight U.S. patents. His research interests include RF/analog/mixed-signal IC design for communications applications. Dr. Zele served as the Professor-in-Charge for IIT Bombay Research Park and a Board Member for the Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE), IIT Bombay’s startup initiative. He has received the Best Paper Award at VLSID 2023. Recently, he received the Excellence in Teaching Award for his past five-year performance. He has presented talks at various IEEE conferences and symposiums. Currently, he is serving as Associate Editor for the IEEE Open Journal of Circuits and Systems (OJCAS).