Outstanding Contribution Award
COMSNETS 2020 Outstanding Contribution Awardees
The COMSNETS Outstanding Contribution Award recognizes an individual for exceptional achievements in the field of communication networks and invaluable service to the growth of COMSNETS.
Prof. Anurag Kumar
IISc Bangalore, IndiaVisit Homepage
Dr. Anurag Kumar obtained his B.Tech. Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in 1977, and was awarded the President of India's Gold Medal. He then obtained the PhD degree from Cornell University (1981), where he worked under the guidance of Prof. T.L. Fine. He was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel, N.J., for over 6 years. During this period he worked on the performance analysis of computer systems, communication networks, and manufacturing systems. Since 1988 he has been with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, in the Dept. of Electrical Communication Engineering (ECE), where he is a Professor, and is also currently the Director of IISc. From 2000 to 2004 he was the Associate Chair of the ECE Department, from 2004 to 2007 he was the Chair of the ECE Department, and from 2007 to 2014 he was the Chair of Electrical Sciences Division. From 1989 to 2003 he was also the Coordinator at IISc of the nationwide Education and Research Network (ERNET) Project, which established the first country-wide packet communication network in India.
His area of research is communication networking, specifically, modeling, analysis, control, and optimisation problems arising in communication networks and distributed systems. Recently his research has focused primarily on wireless networking.
He has served as an Area Editor for IEEE Transactions on Networking, and for IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials. He has been elected a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Science (IASc), a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), and a Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS). He received the IISc Alumni Award for Excellence in Engineering Research for 2008. He has been awarded the DST J.C. Bose National Fellowship for the period 2011-2021.
Prof. P. R. Kumar
Texas A&M University, USAVisit Homepage
Dr. 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. From 1985-2011, he was a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois. Currently he is at Texas A&M University where he is a University Distinguished Professor, Regents Professor, and holds the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Engineering.
Dr. P. R. Kumar has worked on problems in game theory, adaptive control, stochastic systems, simulated annealing, neural networks, machine learning, queueing networks, manufacturing systems, scheduling, wafer fabrication plants and information theory. His current research focus includes renewable energy, smart grid, security, privacy, automated transportation, unmanned aerial vehicle traffic management, wireless networks, 5G, cyber-physical systems, control theory, information theory, stochastic systems, and operations research.
Dr. Kumar is a member of the National Academy of Engineering of the USA, the World Academy of Sciences, and the Indian National Academy of Engineering. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule) in Zurich. He received the IEEE Field Award for Control Systems, the Donald Eckman Award of American Automatic Control Council, the Fred Ellersick Prize of IEEE Communications Society, the Outstanding Contribution Award of ACM SIGMOBILE, the Infocom Achievement Award, and a SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Paper Award. He is an ACM Fellow and a Fellow of IEEE. He was a Guest Chair Professor and Leader of the Guest Chair Professor Group on Wireless Communication and Networking at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He is an Honorary Professor at IIT Hyderabad. He is a D. J. Gandhi Distinguished Visiting Professor at IIT Bombay. He was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras, the Alumni Achievement Award from Washington University in St. Louis, and the Daniel C. Drucker Eminent Faculty Award from the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois.
