Dear Colleagues,
It is an honor and simultaneously a humbling event to be in front of such a distinguished audience today. Occasions such as this are rare, and present an opportunity to acknowledge the contributions of others. This is especially necessary in my case, since my career has largely been a series of happy accidents, of standing on the shoulders of many giants.
My technical career began, as is probably true for most of us, with my mother. She succeeded in schooling three children, even though my father was a geologist, living in tents, moving every week or so, walking about 17 miles each day Geiger counter in hand, and being allowed to return home only for a few months each year during the monsoon season. I also benefited from the care of my grandfather, a person of infinite wisdom. Later, I was fortunate to rub shoulders with some of the brightest students from the country at IIT Madras. Ultimately what rubbed off though was a sense of their high standards, and the lifelong calibration that results from having known people of the highest quality.
It was an accident that brought me to the US. One of my table tennis partners sent me an application form from some place called Washington University, for some program, called Control Systems Science and Engineering. I decided to go there only after I calculated that, in the US, I could actually obtain an MS in nine months, and then return to resume my carefully laid plans for a management career, all within the span of a year. Such indeed are the plans of men and mice!
At Washington University I was a beneficiary of the far-reaching systems vision of John Zaborszky, and of his generosity in allowing us to work with anyone we chose, which in my case was Jan van Schuppen. Those were however the days following the great Boeing layoff, and with an utterly mediocre thesis to boot, I was grateful to receive exactly one job offer, from the Mathematics Department at the Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County. There, I benefited greatly from the discipline of mathematics, and from interacting with top-notch analysts such as Tom Seidman.
Ladies and gentlemen, many of you will agree with me when I say that we in this room are very fortunate and truly lead very envious lives. To quote Longfellow, not only do we get to savor:
“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books.”
but, as if that were not enough, we are in the thick of a heady technological revolution, where nothing seems to be really impossible or undreamable. The times, ladies and gentlemen, as Dylan said, are a changing.
But more than technology and books, what I especially treasure is that over the years I have been fortunate to actually meet a number of great people. One who comes to mind is the incomparable Pravin Varaiya. I have been privileged to have countless hours of conversations indulged in walks all over the world, freely moving between systems theory, economics and politics, and other things under the sun, and his deep perception has educated me beyond my Ph.D. and given me much food for thought.
Over the past three decades, I have also been inspired by another man of letters, Sanjoy Mitter. He has served as an oasis of calm in a frenzied research world, and a connoisseur of systems research. It is because of him that visiting MIT has always been the emotional equivalent of coming home to discuss what you are thinking of, with someone who understands you.
Yet another person of indefatigable energy and positivity, one whose energy level is hard to keep up with, is Karl Astrom. His broad minded appreciation of ideas while being the most practically effective of engineers, his directness of purpose, infectious enthusiasm, incredible depth of knowledge and experience for all things control, has been a great source of positive feedback for me.
It was a fortuitous coincidence that brought me to Illinois. At the podium after my talk at the 1983 CDC in San Antonio, Petar Kokotovic asked me what I wanted were I to move to Illinois, to which my complete reply was, “The usual things.” That was it. When I returned from an overseas trip five or six weeks later there was a job offer for me at Illinois, sans list of references, sans vita, and even sans interview. To this day, I continue to believe that my job at Illinois is completely illegal. I have been inspired by watching his lifelong attention to the lifelong careers of students and colleagues, his careful nurture of scientific ideas, his infinite subtlety, his unsurpassed leadership of institutions, and his ability to make wherever he is the Mecca of control. We have shared many a passionate and free ranging discussion on things political, literary, and scientific.
Indeed I have been truly fortunate in meeting many a kindred soul and great mind. Victor Solo, Marco Campi, John Tsitsiklis, Venkat Ananthram, Jean Walrand, Laurent Praly, Carlos Humes, Vivek Borkar, John Baillieul, Tyrone Duncan, Hector Sussmann, Liang-Liang Xie, Mike Harrison, Peter Caines, Massimo Franceschetti, Graham Goodwin, Steve Morse, Kameshwar Poolla, Bob Gallager, Steve Marcus, John Baras, Harold Kushner, Ray Rishel. The names are too numerous to mention. Then there are my graduate students, whose presence has inspired and rejuvenated me.
Places make people, and I am fortunate to be a member of the Coordinated Science Lab at the University of Illinois, my second home away from home. It is the best research environment in the world.
Ladies and Gentlemen, this award belongs as much to my dear wife Jaya, as to me. She has been my soulmate for the past quarter century. She has been the source of my positive feedback. I have been blessed with her and our two proudest creations, our children Ashwin and Shilpa. It is not only poets who have muses, researchers do too, and she is mine. I dedicate this award to her, and to our two children Ashwin and Shilpa.
Thank you for this honor.
