Hearty congratulations to the recipients of the Faculty Awards

 Prof Priti Shankar Teaching Award:

Dr Arindam Khan, Assistant Professor in CSA, works in the area of algorithms and optimization.
He is a passionate teacher as is evidenced by the consistently excellent teaching ratings and student feedback he has received. Dr. Arindam Khan has used innovative ways to motivate problems or techniques: from Sanskrit prosody and its connection to dynamic programming, to movies and their connections to stable marriages. Students have praised him for his preparedness, use of relatable examples in class, and in-class experiments that highlight interesting statistical paradoxes. Dr Arindam Khan has designed two new courses — Theorist’s Toolkits and Algorithms Under Uncertainty — which have been praised as “diverse, timely, futuristic,” and “a real gem”. 

Prior to joining IISc 2019, Dr Arindam Khan received his BTech and MTech dual degree from IIT Kharagpur, MS and PhD from Georgia Tech, and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Artificial Intelligence Lab and The Technical University at Munich.

Jaya Jayant Award for Teaching Excellence:

Mr. Kuruvilla Varghese is a Chief Research Scientist at ESE. He is leading the Reconfigurable Computing Lab there, and has been at IISc since 1989.
Mr Varghese has been teaching and mentoring students related to digital systems for the past three decades. He designed and offered a lab-oriented course dealing with Field Programmable Gate Arrays, the heart of today’s Systems-on-Chip, for the first time in the country. Later, he recorded the lectures on NPTEL. The feedback from students and industry from all over the country have been excellent.

Mr Varghese has been continuously evolving his course offerings. These are so unique that they have no replacement in the country. His mini projects to students have evolved to significant depth that he and his students developed a 32-bit RISC-V processor architecture and a 32-bit RISC-V Vector processor at advanced Technology Readiness Levels (TRL 6/7). These along with their documentation have been made publicly available for any implementer.

Mr Varghese is a meticulous perfectionist. His methods of lecture delivery and specific attention to audio and video quality in videos, made during the Covid-19 pandemic period at short notice, have been praised as worthy of a pedagogical study. Students in his large classes have given him consistently excellent ratings.

Mr Varghese received the BE degree in Electronics from S.V. Regional Engineering College, Surat, Gujarat, in 1986, and the MTech degree in Electronics Design Technology from CEDT, IISc, in 1989. His main research interests are in high performance accelerators using FPGAs and development of open-source processors.

Alumni Award for Excellence in Research in Engineering 2023: 

Prof Bharadwaj Amrutur started his journey in IISc as an Assistant Professor in Electrical Communication Engineering. He is currently the Chair of the Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber-Physical Systems and the Acting-CEO of Artpark.

His research and academic arc started with Microelectronics and VLSI Systems, transited through IoT and CPS systems, and is now focused on Robotics and Autonomous Systems. During this period, he has mentored over 20 PhD and 50 Masters students for their theses and project. Prof Amrutur also helped establish new academic programmes in the Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber Physical Systems including a new MTech programme in Robotics and Autonomous Systems.

An enduring thread in Prof Amrutur’s low power VLSI research has been his focus on power- performance adaptive design methodologies. His group’s work on adaptive digital baseband design has influenced follow-on works by Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Freescale, etc. Prof. Amrutur has also pushed the state of the art for measuring on-chip delays and clock skews to sub-picosecond levels, and this has found applications in the semiconductor process metrology by companies like Samsung, TSMC, etc.

Prof Amrutur’s research in IoT systems has resulted in a new Data Exchange Framework to enable easy exchange of IoT data across various vertical silos in a smart city. This framework is now a national standard under the Bureau of Industrial Standards (BIS), and has been adopted by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs for creating the India Urban Data Exchange. This has now been rolled out in many Indian Smart Cities like Pune, Varanasi, etc.

Prof Amrutur has also helped found ARTPARK – the AI & Robotics Technology Park – a section-8 not-for-profit company promoted by IISc, to help translate academic breakthroughs in Robotics and Autonomous Systems into start-ups.

Prof Amrutur has been recognised with the Satish Dhawan Young Engineer Award by Govt. of Karnataka, Fellowship by the Indian National Academy of Engineering, and the Abdul Kalam Technology Innovation Fellowship.

Alumni Award for Excellence in Research in Engineering 2023:

Prof A G Ramakrishnan is a Professor in Electrical Engineering and an Associate Faculty in the Centre for Neuroscience. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering.

Lipi Gnani, the Kannada Optical Character Recognition Tool  developed by his team is state-of-the-art both in speed and accuracy. His startup RaGaVeRa Indic Technologies developed a Kannada text-to-speech tool whose quality outperformed several extant text-to-speech tools. These tools have been used to convert 600+ Tamil books to Braille and audio books, and hundreds of Kannada books to e- books. For the above social outreach of his tools, he received the Manthan Award in 2014 & 2015 and his doctoral student received the Gandhian Young Technological Innovation Award 2015.

He was the Leader of the Research Consortium on Recognition of Online Handwriting involving 7 Indian languages, and a Co-Leader of the Research Consortium on Robust Recognition of Indian Language Printed Documents involving 12 Indian languages, funded by the Ministry of Information Technology during 2007 – 2016.
 
He has graduated 19 PhDs and 16 MTechs by research, and has guided over 100 MTech projects.

Currently he is working on the neurophysiological correlates of and brain networks active during different states of consciousness. He is an Associate Editor of Frontiers in Neuroscience.