Prof. Uday B. Desai is an Indian academician who is best known for building up the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, from scratch. In 2009, he was appointed as the first Director of the Institute and continues to nurture the Institute to the best of his abilities. He is also the Mentor Director for IIT Bhilai and IIIT Chittoor. IIT Kanpur has conferred upon him the Distinguished Alumnus Award 2016 for his academic excellence.
Prof. Uday Desai received his B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1974. In 1976, he completed his M.S. from the State University of New York, Buffalo, and in 1979, received his Ph.D. degree from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore in 1979 in the same subject.
In 1979, Prof. Desai joined the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Washington State University, Pullman, WA, U.S.A., as an Assistant Professor and continued till 1984. From 1984 to 1987, he worked as an Associate Professor in the same University. In 1987, he joined the Electrical Engineering Department at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, as a Professor and worked there till May 2009.
His research interests include wireless communication, cognitive radio, wireless sensor networks and statistical signal processing. He is also interested in multimedia, image and video processing, artificial neural networks, computer vision and wavelet analysis. He has published several papers and authored books. He is the Editor of the book Modeling and Applications of Stochastic Processes (Kluwer Academic Press, Boston, U.S.A. 1986) and co-editor of Second Asian Applied Computing Conference, Springer Verlag (2004). He is also a co-author of four books A Bayesian Approach to Image Interpretation, Multifractal based Network Modeling, Multihop Mobile Wireless Networks and Video Shot Boundary Detection.
Prof. Desai has held several visiting positions including a Visiting Associate Professor at the Arizona State University, Purdue University and Stanford University. He was also a Visiting Professor at EPFL, Lausanne during the summer of 2002. From July 2002 to June 2004, he was the Director of HP-IITM R and D Lab. at IIT-Madras. He has been very active with the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY), Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, being the Chair for the Working Group on Communication Convergence and Broadband Technology. Dr. Desai was a member of the high-powered committee for review of AICTE. He was also on the Visitation Panel for the University of Ghana. Prof. Desai is a senior member of IEEE. He chaired the IEEE Bombay Section 2006-2008. He is also an elected fellow of INSA (Indian National Science Academy), INAE (Indian National Academy of Engineering) and IETE (Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers). He is on the board of Tata Communications Limited. He is also on the Governing Council of several education institutes and research bodies. He is one of the founding members of COMSNETS and the Society for Cancer Research and Communication.
