Pradeep Khosla

Professor Khosla Receives SiliconIndia's Leadership Award For Excellence in Academics

Pradeep Khosla, Philip and Marsha Dowd Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Robotics and Head, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, received a Leadership award for Excellence in academics from SiliconIndia at their Annual Technology and Entrepreneurship Conference and Leadership Awards held in San Jose, CA, on October 14 and 15. SiliconIndia, a well know publication in Silicon Valley, promotes relations between the Indian community and the technology world.

Jim Morris, Dean of Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science, presented Khosla with the Leadership Award in the Category of Academics, one of five publicly voted nomination awards presented by SiliconIndia. These awards represent the hard work, talent and excellence of thousands of other Indians who have dedicated their life to the technology world. From his impressive list of accomplishments, it is clear that Khosla strives for excellence and is dedicated to his work.

With a Bachelors in Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology (Kharagpur, India) and advanced degrees from Carnegie Mellon University (M.S. and Ph.D.), Khosla has become a recognized leader in embedded and intelligent robotic systems research. His trend-setting work, including robotic vehicles, systems, and advanced simulation software, pushes the technological frontiers of today and may shape the way we live our lives in the future.

Professor Khosla's research interests are in the areas of:

• internet-enabled collaboratve design and distributed manufacturing
• collaborating autonomous systems
• agent-based architectures for distributed design and embedded control
• software composition and reconfigurable software for real-time embedded systems
• reconfigurable and distributed robotic systems
• integrated design-assembly planning systems
• distributed information systems

His research is multidisciplinary and has focused on the theme of "creating complex embedded and information systems through composition of and collaboration amongst building blocks". Professor Khosla's research has resulted in 2 books and more than 200 journal articles, conference papers and book contributions.

In addition to his ground-breaking research, Khosla is also an active and engaging professor. He served as Asst Professor of ECE and Robotics (1986-90), Associate Professor (1990-94), and Professor (1994 - ), Founding Director (1/97-6/99) of Institute for Complex Engineered Systems (which includes the former Engineering Design Research Center - a NSF ERC). During his tenure ICES grew to a total budget of more than $12M per year. He achieved this by strategically positioning ICES to pursue interdisciplinary projects in Embedded Systems, Tissue Engineering, Design and Manufacturing, and Networking. He is currently the Philip and Marsha Dowd Professor of Engineering and Robotics, and Head of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon. Prior to joining Carnegie-Mellon, he worked with Tata Consulting Engineers and Siemens (1980- 82) in the area of real-time control.

He is involved in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Design, and Robotics education both at the graduate and the undergraduate level. He was a member of the committee that formulated a curriculum for the multidisciplinary PhD program in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon. He was also a member of the Wipe the Slate Clean Committee that created a new 4 year undergraduate ECE degree curriculum at CMU. In support of the new curriculum he developed the Introductory Freshman level course "Introduction to Electrical and Computer Engineering" that emphasizes the notion of Teaching in Context. He is the co-author of a text book and a laboratory manual related to this course.

Professor Khosla's contributions and achievements have no gone unnoticed. He has received numerous honors, among them:

• Siliconindia 2000 Leadership award for Excellence in academics
• The Inlaks Fellowship, United Kingdom
• The Carnegie Institute of Technology Ladd award for excellence in research in 1989
• ASEE 1999 George Westinghouse Award for Education
• Two NASA Tech Brief awards (1992, 1993)
• Elected IEEE Fellow in January 1995
• Appointed a Distinguished lecturer for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society for 1998-99

Outside academia, Khosla's expertise has been much in demand. He has served on many advisory boards, workshops, and panels. To name a few:

• The Technical Advisory Board of DoD and NASA-JPL projects
• The Department of Commerce workshops on the Intelligent Manufacuring Systems program
• USA-Japan R&D consortia and collaboration
• DARPA ISAT study panels.

During a leave lasting from January 1994 to August 1996 from Carnegie Mellong University, Khosla served as a DARPA Program Manager in the Software and Intelligent Systems Technology Office (SISTO), Defense Sciences Office (DSO) and Tactical Technology Office (TTO), where he managed advanced research and development programs, with a total budget exceeding $50M in FY96.

At present, Khosla acts as Chairman of the Board of K2T, Inc., a high tech company he helped found based in Pittsburgh. He is a co-founder and member of the Board of Quantapoint inc and Halosoft inc. -- two high tech companies based in Pittsburgh. Halosoft specializes in internet software for and Peer to Peer applications and is funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. Quantapoint specializes in high precision laser scanners that are used for creating high fidelity 3D models of as built structures. The company is serving various market segments including Architecture and Engineering, Movie Industry, and Video Game industry. Khosla also is a consultant for several U.S. industries and several venture capitalists. He serves on many advisory boards, including:

Abeona Networks (technical board)

Alcoa

Institute for Systems Research at University of Maryland

The College of Engineering at Michigan State University (Dean's advisory board)

Also recognized at the SiliconIndia Annual Technology and Entrepreneurship Conference and Leadership Awards was SCS Alumnus Pradeep Sindhu (PhD CS, 1983), Vice Chairman, CTO & Founder of Juniper Networks, Inc., who received the Technologist of the Year award. Read more about Sindu and the award he received at:
http://www.scs.cmu.edu/stars/2000/11/psindhu.html

Find out about more SCS Alumni at:
http://www.scs.cmu.edu/people/alumni/

For more information about Pradeep Khosla, visit his Web site at:
http://www.ece.cmu.edu/people/fac/khosla.html

SiliconIndia is on the Web at:
http://www.siliconindia.com