JOIN US'Sudha Murty' chair launched at IISc
The “Mrs. Sudha Murty Distinguished Chair”, one of the three distinguished chairs instituted by Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan and his wife Sudha Gopalakrishnan at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), was launched here on Wednesday.
The first of these three chairs, the ‘K Vaidyanathan Distinguished Chair’, was launched in June and Prof Shihab Shamma from the Institute of Systems Research, the University of Maryland, College Park, USA, was its first recipient. The second chair of professorships launched on Wednesday has been named after Sudha Murty, chairperson of the Infosys Foundation and an alumnus of IISc.
Professor Vasant Honavar, the Edward Frymoyer Endowed Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University, is the first recipient of the chair. Each chair has been set up with a corpus of Rs 10 crore.
Honavar is also the Director of the Center for Big Data Analytics and Discovery Informatics and the Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University. A release from the IISc has described Honavar’s expertise in the field of artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, data science, health informatics,
neural computing and neuroinformatics.
“These chairs intend to invigorate and accelerate extremely important emerging interdisciplinary research areas. I am sure Prof Shihab Shamma and Prof Vasant Honavar will add a new dimension to research collaboration between IISc researchers and star contributors to these areas anywhere in the world,” said Prof Anurag Kumar, director, IISc.
Kris Gopalakrishnan talked about Sudha Murty being an inspiration for many, including himself: “I hope the launching of these distinguished chair positions will help push the frontiers of brain-inspired research. It would be excellent if the collaborations lead to highly creative new computing architectures and algorithms inspired by the functioning of the brain,” he said.
In June 2015, Pratiksha Trust, Bengaluru, founded by Kris and Sudha Gopalakrishnan, set up the three distinguished chair professorships so as to bring top researchers in the areas of neuromorphic computing, computational neuroscience, machine learning and data science to IISc and to help strengthen research and international collaboration.