Thomas Kailath obtained a B.E.(Telecom) degree from the College of Engineering in Pune, India, in !956 and M.S. (1959) and Sc.D. (1961) degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

After a year at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, he joined Stanford University in 1963 as an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, was promoted to Professor in 1968, and named to the Hitachi America Chair in 1988. He assumed Emeritus status in June 2001. His research has spanned a large number of engineering and mathematical disciplines, and he has mentored over a hundred doctoral and postdoctoral students. Their joint efforts have led to over 300 journal papers, several of which have received outstanding paper prizes; they have also led to a dozen patents and to several books and monographs. He has also co-founded and served as a director of several private and public high-technology companies.

He is a fellow of the IEEE and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Indian National Academy of Engineering, the Academy of Sciences of the Developing World and the Royal Spanish Academy of Engineering. In 2006, he was inducted into the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame.

Other major honors include several IEEE medals and prizes, including the 2007 Medal of Honor in 2007, Guggenheim and Churchill Fellowships, and honorary degrees from universities in Sweden, Scotland, Spain and France.

Kanwal Rekhi (born 1945) is an Indian-American engineer, businessman and millionaire philanthropist.

Kanwal was born in Rawalpindi (then in British India, now in Pakistan). After the partition of India, his family settled in Kanpur, India. In 1967 Rekhi graduated as an electrical engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India and in 1969 he received a Master of Science degree from Michigan Technological University. Kanwal has been a major donor to Michigan Tech, including a gift of $5 million for new computer science facilities. He worked as an engineer, systems analyst, and manager for many years before floating his first company, Excelan in 1982. Excelan was a manufacturer of smart Ethernet cards, and was also responsible for the commercial growth of the internet protocol TCP/IP. The company merged with, and was acquired by Novell in 1989 and Kanwal was given a seat on the board.

Kanwal was named Entrepreneur of the Year in 1987 by the Arthur-Young/Venture magazine. He was named to the Board of Advisors to the President of Michigan Tech and in 1997 was honoured with a doctorate in Business and Engineering. Kanwal is also involved in increasing the visibility of premier educational institutions in India. He gave US $3 million to IIT Bombay to help set up a new School of Information Technology, named KReSIT (Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology), which opened in 1999.

Kanwal is a past Chairman and trustee of TiE, The Indus Entrepreneurs. He is also Chairman of the Centre for Civil Society, a think tank in India.

Dr. Mitta is the former Managing Director of e4e in Bangalore, India – a leader in next generation outsourcing services. Sridhar has known the Managers for over a decade.

Dr. Mitta has worked with Kanwal and Saurabh building The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) organization across India, and worked at Wipro with Samir for nearly ten years, he has been an internationally recognized expert in the effective management of multi-national R&D in Information Technology. He was involved with Wipro Technologies since its inception in 1980, ultimately becoming the CTO and head of Global R&D helping to pioneer global delivery of outsourced product development services to technology majors such as Intel, Cisco, Lucent, and Sun Microsystems. Wipro became the highest valued company in India during his tenure, and today is a $2.5 billion revenue Indian IT company with nearly 20% operating profit margins and a $22 billion market capitalization. Dr. Mitta was the President of the Bangalore Chapter of The IndUS Entrepreneurs through 2006 and serves on several Boards of companies located in the United States and India.

He holds a PhD and MS from Oklahoma State University; an MS from IIT-Kharagpur; and a BSEE from Andhra University, India. He is a senior member of IEEE and Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering.

Hosakere N. Mahabala, Ph.D (University of Saskatchewan, Canada) Professor Mahabala received his Ph.D. from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.

He has served on the faculty of the Indian Institute of Science, University of Saskatchewan, University of Waterloo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and IIT-Kanpur and retired from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1995. He has served as the President of the Computer Society of India and as Member, Electronic Commission (Govt. of India). His interests are Software Engineering, VLSI Design and Expert Systems. He has been awarded the 'Lifetime Achievement Award' by Dataquest in 1998. He is currently an expert member of the IT Standards Board (BITES) setup by the Government of Karnataka.