Kailath will receive the award at the annual Marconi Society Awards dinner in Summit
Thomas Kailath, an Indian American scholar, and scientist will be honored with Marconi Society Lifetime Achievement award.
He is the sixth scientist to achieve the Marconi Society Lifetime Achievement award.
Kailath, who was born in India, is an emeritus professor and scholar from Stanford University. He will receive the award for his transformative contributions to information and system science for over six decades as well as for his sustained mentoring and development of new generations of scientists.
Kailath will receive the award at the annual Marconi Society Awards dinner on October 23.
At the same time another Indian American, Arun Netravali, the former Bell Labs President will be awarded $100,000 Marconi Prize for Digital Video.
Thomas Kailath was born in 1935 in Pune and his parents belong to Kerala.
He completed his schooling from St Vincent High School. He completed his graduation in Telecommunications Engineering from the College of Engineering, Pune in 1956.
Kailath has a great influence over his students and they considered him as their best mentor.
Along with his students, he founded four companies, two of which went public: Integrated System, Inc, founded in 1980 and now part of Intel, and in 1996, Numerical Technologies, Inc, acquired by Synopsis in 2003.
He has mentored a number of students over his career at Stanford University and a hand full of them had reached successful positions in their field.
Kailath has collected a lot of awards and honors over his lifetime. He received Padma Bhushan in 2009, the third highest civilian honor in India.
“The award is being conferred on Kailath for mentoring a generation of research scholars and writing a classic textbook in linear systems that changed the way the subject is taught and his special purpose architecture to implement the signal processing algorithms on VLSI (Very Large Scale System Integration) chips,” The Marconi society said.
Another Indian American scientist to be honored by the Marconi Society is Arun Netravali. He is the former president of Bell Labs. The Marconi Society has announced the award for Netravali on June 15. He is considered as the father of digital video.
Netravali was born in Mumbai on 1946 and graduated from IIT, Mumbai. Later, however, he switched from chemical engineering to electrical engineering.
Netravali landed in the US in 1967 to join Rice University as a graduate student. He completed his PhD in 1970.