New Delhi, March 1 (IANS) Prof. Thomas Kailath of Stanford University, who was recently inducted in the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame, is an educator and entrepreneur par excellence.

This honour is the latest in a series of honours and awards that have been bestowed on him througout his chequered career.

In an article by Francis C Assisi in www.indolink.com, he is described as colossus straddling the world of academia and industry, mathematics and engineering for 45 years. The only award missing from the long list honours conferred on is the Nobel Prize, according to the article, which is a glowing tribute to this multifaceted personality. However, it adds, the Institute for Scientific Information’s (ISI) database of 'Highly Cited Researchers', has judged him to be 'Nobel Class' as a result of his contributions to two related disciplines: Mathematics and Engineering.

The Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame aims to celebrate the accomplishments of engineers in Silicon Valley who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and have made significant contributions to the Silicon Valley community. The Council’s Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame Award Committee selects inductees and reviews submittals made by member professional societies, corporations, or individuals. Inductees are selected on the basis of professional achievement, service to the profession and service to the community.

Born in Pune on June 7, 1935, Kailath earned his BE degree from Poona University in 1956. He moved to the United States and did his graduate degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

According to the indolink.com article, in his stellar career as an academician, inventor, and an entrepreneur, Kailath is the founder of the Information Systems Laboratory (ISL) at Stanford University (which has played a pivotal technology-transfer role in the growth and success of the Silicon Valley, and boasts numerous highly successful and influential technology companies that have their roots in the research work done in the laboratory).

Professor Kailath has co-founded several high-technology companies, three of which are now public: Integrated Systems, Inc. (founded in 1980 and merged with WindRiver Systems in 1999), Numerical Technologies, Inc. (founded in 1995), and Excess Bandwidth Corporation (founded in 1998 and acquired by Virata Corporation in 2000, which itself merged with Globespan in 2001).

In the course of his research and teaching, he has mentored over a hundred doctoral and postdoctoral students and authored or co-authored over 300 journal papers. He has received outstanding paper prizes from the IEEE Information Theory Society, the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the European Signal Processing Society, and the IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing.

Kailath has held Guggenheim, Churchill and Humboldt fellowships, among others. He served as President of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 1975, and received its Shannon Award in 2000.

Among other awards are the Technical Achievement(1989) and Society(1991) Awards of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the John R Ragazzini Award of the American Control Council in 1983, the first Stevin Medal of the Delft University of Technology in 1996, a Golden Jubilee Paper Award of the IEEE Information Society in 1998,a Golden Jubilee Medal of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society in 2000, the IEEE Education Medal in 1995, the IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Award in 1996, and an IEEE Millennium Medal in 2000.

Kailath is an honorary editor of the J.of Linear Algebra and its Applications and of the Journal of Integral Equations and Operator Theory, besides serving on the editorial boards of several other engineering and mathematics journals. He has served since 1963 as founding editor of a Prentice Hall series of books on information and system sciences.

He has also held short-term appointments at several institutions around the world, including Bell Labs, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Cambridge University, KU Leuven, TU Delft, the Indian Institute of Science, the Indian Statistical Institute, Imperial College, the Weizmann Institute, TU Munich and, of course, MIT.

The indolink.com article also details Kailath's research in the past four decades that has spanned a large number of disciplines: emphasising information theory and communications in the 1960s; linear systems, estimation and control in the 1970s; VLSI design and sensor array signal processing in the 1980s; and applications to semiconductor manufacturing and digital communications in the 1990s.

He joined Stanford University as acting associate professor of Electrical Engineering in 1963. In 1964, he was promoted as associate professor in 1964, in 1968 as and professor. He served as director of the university's Information Systems Laboratory from 1971 through 1980, as associate department chair from 1981 to 1987, and was then appointed the first holder of the Hitachi America Professorship in Engineering. He assumed emeritus status in June 2001, but has been recalled to active duty to continue his research and writing activities.