2003/B.Tech/CS Tan Family Chair Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, USA
Professor Vyas Sekar is a highly accomplished individual who has made significant contributions to the field of computer sciences with specialised work in intersections of networking, security and systems. He is currently a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of leading cybersecurity ventures Scala Computing, Linear, and Armoblox.
Apart from his position in Carnegie Mellon, Professor Sekar has held several other positions in his career so far. He was a Research Scientist at Intel Research Berkeley as well as Intel Science and Technology Center for Secure Computing. He worked as an Assistant Professor at Tony Brooks University after which he went on to teach at Carnegie Mellon University. He has served on numerous top technical program committees, NSF panels, and organised leading conferences including Hotnets, IMC, and NSDI. Furthermore, he has also served as a mentor for students and junior faculty in CMU and beyond, where he played an important role in organising future faculty workshops and early career panels, that many students and early career researchers have benefitted from.
Professor Sekar’s academic background includes a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Madras followed by a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. His seminal research contributions focus on the areas of programmable “software-defined” network functions and network security, data-driven networking to support performance and security, testing and verifying that these are operating as intended, novel network telemetry capabilities, and IoT Security; with significant academic and practical impact. For his work, he has been awarded with numerous awards including the President of India Gold Medal, Tan Family Professorship at ECE, IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize 2020, Eta Kappa NU (HKN) Award for Outstanding Faculty Teaching 2018, Google Faculty Research Awards, Cisco Faculty Research Award, ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award (2016) among others.
Outside his capacity as a teaching faculty, he has also shared his expertise through plenary talk at ACM STOC 2018 TheoryFest, invited keynote at 10th International Conference on Information Systems Security (ICISS 2014), and invited talk at COMSNETS 2017. He has also made regular contributions to research by presenting award-winning papers at conferences like ACM SIGCOMM, ACM CoNext, ACM Multimedia and so on. He also holds patents on the contributions he has made towards the improvement of video streaming and cybersecurity systems.
For his achievements and contributions towards scientific innovation, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and its alumni are proud to confer Professor Vyas Sekar with the YAAA (Young Alumni Achiever Award) for 2022.
