Video conferences

"Challenges for Autonomous Mobile Robots"

John J. Leonard is Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering at MIT and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research addresses the problems of navigation and mapping for autonomous mobile robots. He holds the degrees of B.S.E.E. in Electrical Engineering and Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1987) and D.Phil. in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford (formally 1994). He studied at Oxford under a Thouron Fellowship and Research Assistantship funded by the ESPRIT program of the European Community. Prof. Leonard joined the MIT faculty in 1996, after five years as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and Research Scientist in the MIT Sea Grant Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Laboratory. He has participated in numerous field deployments of AUVs, including under-ice operations in the Arctic and several major experiments in the Mediterranean.  He has served an associate editor of the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering and of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation.  He is the recipient of an NSF Career Award (1998), an E.T.S. Walton Visitor Award from Science Foundation Ireland (2004), and the King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Transactions on Robotics Paper Award (2006)

Date of talk:    September 30th
Time:                8:30 IST

Abha Joshi-Ghani

Sector Manager, Urban Development, Finance, Economics and Urban Development Department.The World Bank.

Abha Joshi-Ghani is Manager, Urban Development, in the Finance, Economics and Urban Development Department of the World Bank. She oversees the World Bank's work on Urban Policy and the Knowledge and Learning practice of the Bank in the Urban Sector. Her Department; provides policy and operational advice to the Bank's Regional departments and clients on key urban themes such as urban housing and land, urban planning, management and municipal finance, urban environment, cities and climate change, urban poverty, cultural heritage and sustainable tourism development and local and city economic development. She is also leading the work on the Bank's Urban Strategy.

   Thomas Kailath is Hitachi America Professor of Engineering, Emeritus at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University. His research has spanned a large number of disciplines, emphasizing information theory and communications in the sixties, linear systems, estimation and control in the seventies, VLSI design and sensor array signal processing in the eighties, and applications to semiconductor manufacturing and wireless communications in the nineties. Concurrently, he contributed to several fields of mathematics, especially stochastic processes, operator theory and linear algebra.

    Professor Kailath is a life fellow of the IEEE and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a foreign member of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, the Academy of Sciences of the Developing World, the Royal Spanish Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society(London). In 2006, he was inducted into the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame. He was awarded a Padma Bhushan, India's third highest civilian honour, in 2009

    Other major honours include several medals and prizes, including the 2007 IEEE Medal of Honor. He has also been awarded Guggenheim, Churchill and Humboldt Fellowships, among others, and honorary degrees from universities in Sweden, Scotland, Spain, France and India.
 
    He obtained a B.E.(Telecom) degree from the College of Engineering in Pune, India, in 1956 and  M.S. (1959) and Sc.D. (1961) degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

From Radiative Transfer Theory to Fast Algorithms for Cell Phones

Professor Kailath will describe how analogies between certain problems in statistical prediction and in radiative transfer led, inter alia, to the development of new fast algorithms (and efficient integrated circuit implementations thereof) for a host of problems in the fields of communications, control, signal processing, linear algebra and operator theory.

Date of Talk: 1st October, 2009
Time: 9:30p.m., IST

Vinod Khosla was a co-founder of Daisy Systems and founding Chief Executive Officer of Sun Microsystems where he pioneered open systems and commercial RISC processors.

Sun was funded by Kleiner Perkins and in 1986 Vinod switched sides and joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). In 2004, driven by the need for flexibility and a desire to be more experimental, to fund sometimes imprudent "science experiments", and to take on both "for profit" and for "social impact" ventures, he formed Khosla Ventures. Khosla Ventures focuses on both traditional venture capital technology investments and clean technology ventures. Social ventures include affordable housing, microfinance among others.

 Vinod holds a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, a Master's in Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Date of Talk: 2^nd October, ICSR Main Audi

Time: 9:00 P.M

Title of Talk: "Forecasting : Ignoring the pundits, and the flaws in extrapolating the past to predict the future."