1985 - B.Tech - Electrical Engineering Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Prof. Srinivas Devadas graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras in 1985, and later, with a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986. In 1988, he obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his outstanding and widely cited research, recognized by several top awards from both IEEE and ACM due to his pioneering work on Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs).
He has had an exceptional teaching and mentoring career of over 30 years as a professor in the EECS Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), lecturing in a large number of subjects and recently sole-authoring a well-received introductory programming textbook (Programming for the Puzzled, 2017). As a crown feather, he was awarded MIT’s two top teaching awards (the MacVicar Fellowship, and the Baker Award), and the top teaching award from MIT’s School of Engineering (the Bose award).
Prof. Devadas’ academic leadership includes serving as Associate Head and Interim Head of the EECS Department at MIT for six years with a key role in architecting a joint degree program with biology, and also designing and introducing a very popular computer science minor at MIT. His research (which has spawned 23 patents) has translated into a successful company, Verayo. Prof. Devadas’ pioneering work on low-cost cryptographic hardware authentication has had a wide impact. Prof. Devadas founded Verayo in 2005 to commercialize this technology; Verayo has sold tens of millions of RFID Arbiter PUFs. Academically, many conferences (e.g. CCS, DAC, CHES, HOST) include PUFs in their call for papers. DARPA funds several organizations to build PUFs, and work on PUFs now takes place in many universities.
Earlier in his career, Prof. Devadas received much recognition for his work on low-power circuit design and computer-aided circuit design. He subsequently also developed a processor (AEGIS) that can use untrusted memory securely and remains secure even with an untrusted operating system. On the teaching front, he has been a veritable powerhouse, responsible for developing and teaching several subjects that have now become foundational in MIT’s CS curriculum, and taken by several hundred students each year. He has also developed sophisticated automated grading tools for software courses. In addition, he leads the CS branch of MIT PRIMES, which brings talented high school students in for summer research.
For his exemplary contributions to research in distributed computing, IIT Madras and its alumni are proud to confer this award upon Prof. Srinivas Devadas.
