Keynote Speakers  
   
   

Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala
Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India

Dr. Jhunjhunwala 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 as Assistant Professor. Since 1981, he has been teaching at IIT, Madras, where he leads the Telecommunications and Computer Networks group (TeNeT). This group is closely working with industry in the development

of technologies relevant to India. TeNeT group has incubated several technology companies which work in partnership with TeNeT group to develop Telecom and Banking products for Indian Urban Rural Markets. He chairs Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI) at IIT Madras and Mobile Payment Forum of India (MPFI).

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 and IBM Innovation and Leadership Forum Award by IBM for the year 2006. He is a Fellow of World Wireless Research forum and Indian academies including INAE, IAS, INSA and NAS.

Dr. Jhunjhunwala is a Director in the Board of State Bank of India, TTML, BEL, Polaris, 3i Infotech, Sasken, Tejas and IDRBT. He is member of Prime Minister's Scientific Advisory Committee.

   
 
   

Prof. P.R. Kumar
University of Illionois, Urbana-Champaign, USA
Franklin W. Woeltge Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Professor, Coordinated Science Laboratory
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

Title: From wireless networks to cyberphysical systems
Abstract:

We examine six themes in this emerging area:

  • Transporting information over wireless networks
  • Providing Quality of Service in wireless networks
  • Extracting information from sensor networks
  • Synchronizing clocks over wireless networks
  • Abstractions for systems over networks
  • Holistic system analysis

Bio:

P. R. Kumar obtained his B. Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering (Electronics) from I.I.T. Madras in 1973, and the M.S. and D.Sc. degrees in Systems Science and Mathematics from Washington University, St. Louis in 1975 and 1977, respectively.

From 1977-84 he was a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.Since 1985 he has been at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he is currently Franklin W. Woeltge Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a Research Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory.

He has worked on problems in game theory, adaptive control, stochastic systems, simulated annealing, neural networks, machine
learning, queueing networks, manufacturing systems, scheduling, and wafer fabrication plants. His current research interests are in wireless networks, sensor networks, and networked embedded control systems.

He has received the the IEEE Field Award in Control Systems, the Donald P. Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control Council, and the Fred W. Ellersick Prize of the IEEE Communications Society. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the IEEE.

 
 

Prof. Henning Schulzrinne , Columbia University
Professor and Chair
Department of Computer Science
Columbia University, New York, USA

Title: Networking - Civil engineering for the 21st century

Abstract:
Computer networks, as the largest interdependent engineering artifact, now form one of the four core foundation of modern societies, along with energy, water/sanitation and transportation. No country can hope to develop if one of these foundations is brittle or lacking depth. As networking researchers, we have a unique responsibility to improve the capabilities, performance, security and reliability of this infrastructure. In many cases, such improvements offer the greatest hope of improving the other three infrastructures.

In this talk, I will try to highlight what I see as the challenges facing networks and networking research. There seems to be a disconnect between the amount of effort expended on research on topics of marginal potential impact and the real problems faced by network users, architects and providers. The number of papers on a topic, from QoS to sensor networks, often exceeds the number of users; standardization and research are often disconnected. I will argue that, just as for energy and transportation, reliability, cost and safety should be core concern driving our research and standardization efforts. This includes designing system for long-term evolution and manageability, as well as recognizing that most users have no interest in the technology itself. As illustrations, I will describe efforts to simplify end user fault diagnosis, to bridge network disconnections and to modernize emergency calling systems.

Bio:
Prof. Henning Schulzrinne received his undergraduate degree in economics and electrical engineering from the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany, his MSEE degree as a Fulbright scholar from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts. He was a member of technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill and an associate department head at GMD-Fokus (Berlin), before joining the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments at Columbia University, New York. He is currently chair of the Department of Computer Science.

His interests are in Internet real-time and multimedia services and protocols, ubiquitous computing, mobile systems, quality of service, modeling and analysis of computer-communication networks, operating systems, network security. Protocols co-developed by him, such as RTP, RTSP and SIP, are now Internet standards, used by almost all Internet telephony and multimedia applications. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is editor of the "IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking", the "ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing", the "ComSoc Surveys & Tutorials" and the "IEEE Internet Computing Magazine", and a former editor of the "IEEE Transactions on Image Processing" and "Journal of Communications and Networks". He has been a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Communications Society and is vice chair of ACM SIGCOMM, and a former chair of the IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee.