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He joined technology greats like Claude Shannon and Gordon Moore with this honour that recognizes his seminal contributions to modern communications
India-born Professor of Engineering Emeritus at Stanford University in the US, Dr Thomas Kailath (82) is to be honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Marconi Society.
It is a unique accolade, because it is only the sixth such award in the 43 year history of the Society named after Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of wireless communication. Earlier awardees have included Claude Shannon who is considered the Father of Information Theory, the mathematical base of communications; and Gordon Moore, who gave his name to Moore's Law which suggests that the complexity of semiconductor chips doubles every 18 months or so.
Dr Kailath's work, too has been seminal and path breaking with transformative contributions to information and system science over six decades.
The award also salutes his "sustained mentoring and development of new generations of scientists and acknowledges the wide range of his contributions to information theory, communications, filtering theory, linear systems and control, signal processing, semiconductor manufacturing, probability and statistics, linear algebra, matrix and operator theory, which have directly or indirectly advanced modern communications technology."
Kailath and his students hold a dozen patents, and they have successfully transitioned some of the research into industry. Together with his students he co-founded four companies, two of which went public: Integrated Systems, Inc., founded in 1980 and now part of Intel, and in 1996, Numerical Technologies, Inc., acquired by Synopsis in 2003.
Prof. Kailath mentored over a hundred doctoral and postdoctoral scholars, many of whom have gone on to become leaders in academia and in industry. They include Arogyaswami Paulraj, currently Emeritus Professor in the electrical engineering department at Stanford University, who was himself honored with the Marconi Prize in 2014.
Kailath and Paulraj, are joint holders of the original US patent for MIMO technology which underpins the technology that drives every WiFi, 4 G, and 5G network today and helps to make them more efficient.
Says Dr Paulraj: "Thomas Kailath has been an influential mentor to a number of Indian academics, including me, who worked in communications and control theory. He hosted many of us at his research group at Stanford University, even in lean times when federal funding was tight. Tom has maintained close linkages with the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore for over thirty years and in the 1970s, also advised the Ministry of Defence, in setting up the Research Centres at the IITs to support the Air Defense Ground Environment System (ADGES) plan of the Indian Air Force. While the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Marconi Society recognizes Tom's outstanding contributions at the global level, we in India can take special pride in Prof. Kailath's remarkable achievements."
While Kailath's parents belonged to Mavelikkara and Chengannur in Kerala, he was born in Pune in 1935 and studied in St Vincent's High School before obtaining his Bachelor’s degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the College of Engineering, Pune, in 1956. He came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT) in 1957 with a research assistantship in the Information Theory Group and his work soon generated widespread notice. After his doctorate in electrical engineering in June 1961, the first Indian-born student to get one at MIT, he was invited to join the pioneering Digital Communications Research Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Kailath simultaneously held a visiting assistant professorship at Caltech.
In January 1963, he accepted an associate professorship at Stanford, becoming a full professor in 1968. He served as Director of the Information Systems Laboratory from 1971 through 1980, building it into a world-leading centre for communications, control and signal processing research. He was Associate Chair of the Electrical Engineering Department Chair from 1981 to 1987 and in 1988 was appointed as the first holder of the Hitachi America Professorship in Engineering at Stanford. Although he became Emeritus in June 2001, he has been recalled to active duty, and he continues his research and writing activities to this day.
Kailath’s career has earned him dozens of major awards and honours, notably a 2012 National Medal of Science from President Obama “for transformative contributions to the fields of information and system science, for distinctive and sustained mentoring of young scholars, and for translation of scientific ideas into entrepreneurial ventures that have had a significant impact on industry”.
His 2007 IEEE Medal of Honor was “for exceptional contributions to the development of powerful algorithms for communications, control, computation and signal processing.”
The Indian government conferred the Padma Bhushan on Prof Kailath in 2009.
Prof S. Sadagopan, Director of the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore says: "Prof. Kailath has been an inspiration for generations of Indian students in communication and information systems. Many of them were privileged to hear him for the first time, when he presided over our convocation ceremony in 2011 -- and he quickly attained rock star status here."
Kailath will receive his award at the annual Marconi Society Awards dinner in Summit, New Jersey, on October 3, where another Indian, former Bell Labs President Arun Netravali, the “father of digital video”, will be honored with the $100,000 Marconi Prize.
