Thomas Kailath Wins IEEE Medal of Honor (07 Dec 2006)
By RICHARD SPRINGER
India-West Staff Reporter
Thomas Kailath, Hitachi America Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, at Stanford
University, was named this week the winner of the 2007 Medal of Honor by the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, one of the most prestigious
technology associations in the world.
Since the medal was inaugurated in 1917, only one other Indian American has
received it - C. Kumar Patel of AT&T Bell Labs, who was given the medal in 1989
for his contributions in developing the carbon dioxide laser and the spin flip
Raman laser.
Kailath, a prolific researcher whose theoretical work led to significant
breakthroughs in communications, information theory, signal detection and
semiconductor manufacturing, is being given IEEE's most prestigious award for
his "exceptional development of powerful algorithms in the field of
communications, computing control and signal processing."
He will receive the gold medal, bronze replica, certificate and $50,000 prize at
an honors ceremony next June at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel.
IEEE also announced this week that Narayana N.R. Murthy, chairman and chief
mentor of Bangalore-based Infosys Technologies Ltd., would receive the Ernst
Weber Engineering Leadership Recognition honor, among 12 medals, a service award
and leadership recognition award to be presented in June.
Murthy, who founded Infosys with six other software professionals in 1981 and
served as chief executive for more than 20 years, is being recognized for his
"pioneering role in the globalization of information technology software and
services, and leadership in establishing global business governance practices in
India."
Reached by phone on a short vacation, Kailath told India-West, "It's a very
great honor and I'm very happy. But I want to emphasize that it's a collective
award. A lot of wonderful students, post-docs and friends contributed. About 100
of those are among the very best."
He said he started out doing individual work but then tapped into the resources
and talent at in the university milieu. As more friends sent him better and
better students, "we entered new areas every decade."
About half of Kailath's doctoral and postdoctoral students have gone on to
become IEEE Fellows.
Kailath said that while there have been other Medal of Honor winners in signal
processing - in areas such as speech recognition, for example, he believes he is
the only one in the statistical signal processing field.
"Many of us have met individuals who have made deep contributions in specific
technical fields, or had a major impact on industry, or had a major impact on
their academic discipline or educated the leaders of the future," said Jim
Plummer, dean of the Stanford School of Engineering. "Tom is essentially unique
in that he has done all of these things at the very highest levels."
Two of his former students, John Cioffi and Arogyaswami Paulraj, have since
joined him at Stanford and as members of the U.S. National Academy of
Engineering.
"Speaking as one of his many Ph.D. advisees over the years but I suspect for
most, I would say Tom Kailath is more of a father than just an advisor," Cioffi
said.
"He continues to look after the interests of his former students carefully,
decades after they've graduated. His group just has to have been more successful
than any academic group in electrical engineering history. That is a tremendous
credit to Tom, his energy, his intelligence, and his encouragement."
John M. Wozencraft, Kailath's Ph.D. advisor at MIT, where the Indian American
received his doctorate in electrical engineering in 1961, in a note of
congratulations to the medal winner, said, "It is students that make teaching
fun, and I will never forget all I learned from my first doctoral candidate."
Kailath, who grew up in Pune and received a B.E. in telecom from Poona
University, is a past president of the IEEE Information Theory Society, a
recipient of its Shannon Award and a winner of Guggenheim and Churchill
fellowships.
His many other honors include the IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal in
2006 and the IEEE Education Medal, so this year's honor gives him the rare hat
trick of three IEEE awards.
Kailath is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the
U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
the Indian National Academy of Engineering and the Silicon Valley Engineering
Hall of Fame, an aggregation of academy memberships that is unprecedented.
The IEEE has more than 365,000 members in 160 countries. The organization
sponsors or co-sponsors about 400 international technical conferences each year.
