JOIN USThe Indian Institute of Science (IISc) is all set to get three distinguished chair positions all thanks to the generosity of Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan and his wife Sudha Gopalakrishnan.
A corpus of Rs 10 crore will be entrusted to set up each Chair through the couple’s charitable trust, the Pratiksha Trust. The first of these three chairs was launched on Monday and will be called the ‘K Vaidyanathan Distinguished Chair’, after Sudha Gopalakrishnan’s father.
Prof Shihab Shamma from the Institute of Systems Research, the University of Maryland, College Park, USA, will be the first recipient of the chaired professorship.
A release from the IISc described Shamma as a “distinguished electrical engineer with stellar contributions and expertise in neuromorphic computing, neural signal processing, representation of speech signals in the brain, and neuromorphic engineering”.
The release further stated that the purpose of these three chair professorships was to bring distinguished researchers in the areas of Computational Neuroscience, Machine Learning, Data Science, and Neuromorphic Engineering and Computing to the IISc campus for collaborative research interactions, besides fostering intense research collaboration between world-renowned researchers and the IISc.
Kris Gopalakrishnan said, “I hope the launching of these distinguished chair positions will help push the frontiers in these areas. It would be excellent if the collaborations lead to highly creative new computing architectures and algorithms inspired by the functioning of the brain.”
Pratiksha Trust has also endowed three similar chairs at IIT Madras.
IISc alumni meet
The IISc will organise an Alumni Global Conference between June 25 and June 28 at its campus. Previous editions of the conference have been held at Santa Clara, California, in 2007, and in Chicago in 2013.
The theme of the event is ‘Science for Society’ with primary focus on the contribution of IISc to the development of the nation. A number of well-known personalities such as Bharat Ratna Prof C N R Rao, former CEO of Infosys Technologies, Kris Gopalakrishnan, and chairperson of the Infosys Foundation in India, Sudha Murty, have confirmed their participation in the event.
Over the three days, the event will host sessions on a broad range of topics, including ‘Contribution of IISc to Strategic Sectors’, ‘Nanoscience and Engineering’, and ‘Brain Research’.