Prof. Uday B. Desai

(BT/EE/1974)

Prof. Uday B. Desai is a distinguished Indian academician, best known for establishing and building the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, from the ground up. In 2009, he was appointed as the first Director of the Institute and nurtured it into one of the top 10 engineering institutes in India. He also served as the Mentor Director for IIT Bhilai and IIIT Chittoor. IIT Kanpur conferred upon him the Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2016 in recognition of his academic excellence.
He currently serves as Vice President of INSA, Chancellor of Anurag University, and Chancellor of ICFAI University, Dehradun. He is a Past Vice President of INAE and serves on the boards of several IIITs, private companies, and private universities. He is an advisor to numerous engineering institutions across India and serves as Chair or member of several committees under DST, MeitY, and DRDO.

Profile

Prof. Uday Desai earned his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1974, followed by an M.S. from the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA, in 1976, and a Ph.D. in the same discipline from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, in 1979. He began his academic career in 1979 as an Assistant Professor at Washington State University and later served as an Associate Professor until 1987. In 1987, he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT Bombay as a Professor, where he served until May 2009.
His research interests span wireless communication, cognitive radio, wireless sensor networks, and statistical signal processing. He also has strong interests in multimedia systems, image and video processing, artificial neural networks, computer vision, and wavelet analysis. Prof. Desai has published

extensively in these areas and has authored and edited several books. He is the editor of Books: Modeling and Applications of Stochastic Processes (Kluwer Academic Press, Boston, 1986) and co-editor of the Second Asian Applied Computing Conference proceedings (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 academic positions, including Visiting Associate Professor at Arizona State University, Purdue University, and Stanford University. He also served as a Visiting Professor at EPFL, Lausanne, during the summer of 2002. From July 2002 to June 2004, he was the Director of the HP-IIT Madras R&D Laboratory. He has been actively associated with the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, where he served as Chair of the Working Group on Communication Convergence and Broadband Technology. He was also a member of the high-powered committee for the review of AICTE and served on the Visitation Panel for the University of Ghana.
Prof. Desai is a Senior Member of IEEE and served as Chair of the IEEE Bombay Section from 2006 to 2008. He is an elected Fellow of INSA (Indian National Science Academy), INAE (Indian National Academy of Engineering), and IETE (Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers). He serves on the Board of Tata Communications Limited and is a member of the governing councils of several educational institutions and research organizations. He is also one of the founding members of COMSNETS and the Society for Cancer Research and Communication.

Achievements and Honors

• Recipient of the Outstanding Alumni Award from SUNY Buffalo
• Recipient of Distinguished Alumnus Award, 2016 by IIT Kanpur.
• Outstanding Alumni Award from University of Buffalo (State University of New York, Buffalo), USA, 2015.
• Honoris Causa (Doctor of Science) from K L University, Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh.
• Lifetime Achievement Award from the Indian Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
• IETE S K Mitra Memorial Award, 2012.
• Excellence in Teaching Award, IIT Bombay, 2007.
• Distinguished Lecturer for IEEE Communication Society (ComSoc) for 2008-2009.
• Recipient of Ram Lal Wadhwa Award from Indian Institute of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers, 2001.
• Felicitation by Society for Cancer Research and Communication, Bombay, India, January 2003.
• Microsoft Innovations Award: Faculty Mentor for the Microsoft Innovations Award for use of Bluetooth Technology in Safe In-flight Wireless Telephony, from IEEE Computer Society International Design Competition, 2001.
• General Co-Chair for the Sixth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, January 1998.