1965 - B.Tech - Electrical Engineering Emeritus Professor @ California Institute of Technology, USA
Dr. Chandy graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in “Light Current” Electrical Engineering (Electronics) from IIT Madras in 1965, and later, with a Master’s degree from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1966. In 1969, he obtained his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Electrical Engineering at the Operations Research Center. After working for Honeywell and IBM, Dr. Chandy joined the Computer Science Department of the University of Texas at Austin and served from 1970-1987, including stints as Chair in 1978-79 and 1983-85. Since 1987, he has been at the California Institute of Technology, first as Sherman Fairchild Fellow for two years, and then as Simon Ramo Chair Professor in Computer Science till 2014. He is now an Emeritus Professor at Caltech.
Dr. Chandy’s research focuses on distributed command and control systems, and on applications of such systems to crisis management and homeland security. The core problem that Dr. Chandy studies deals with systems that respond to events. Sense-and-respond systems react to significant changes in the state of the environment. Key issues are the definition of a “significant change”, the detection of the change, and the execution of an appropriate response to the change. Dr. Chandy has carried out pioneering work in this realm of research.
He received the A. A. Michelson Award in 1985 and the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award in 1995 for his contributions to computer performance modeling. He was awarded the John Sherman Fairchild Scholarship in 1987. He received the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award and the ACM Edsger W. Dijkstra prize, with Leslie Lamport, for their paper on distributed snapshots. He received the IEEE Harry H Goode Award in 2017 with Jayadev Misra for contributions to distributed computing. He became an IEEE Fellow in 1990, and was inducted into the United States National Academy of Engineering in 1995. He has received teaching Awards at the University of Texas and at Caltech, and has graduated more than 30 Ph.D. students. Dr. Chandy has written four books and published widely-cited papers on queuing theory and the performance analysis of computing and communication systems; formal reasoning about concurrent computing systems; programming languages for parallel computing; complex event processing for detecting threats such as earthquakes; and mathematical models of electrical power systems.
For his exemplary contributions to research in distributed computing, IIT Madras and its alumni are proud to confer this award upon Dr. Kanianthra Mani Chandy.
