L.M. Patnaik earned his Ph.D. in 1978 in the area of real-time systems and his D.Sc. in 1989 in the areas of computer systems and architectures, both from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru. From March 2008 to August 2011, he served as the Founding Vice-Chancellor of the Defence Institute of Advanced Technology, a Deemed University in Pune. Currently, he is a NASI Senior Scientist and Adjunct Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru. Over his 55 years of service, his teaching, research, and development interests have encompassed parallel and distributed computing, computer architecture, CAD of VLSI systems, high-performance computing, mobile computing, theoretical computer science, real-time systems, soft computing, and computational neuroscience—including AI and machine cognition. He has published over 1,300 papers in refereed international journals and conference proceedings. He is a Fellow of all four leading Science and Engineering Academies of India, as well as IEEE and TWAS. Debabrata Das is currently serving as Director of IIIT Bangalore (IIITB). Before joining IIITB in 2002, he served at the G.S. Sanyal School of Telecommunication at IIT Kharagpur and later at Kirana Networks in New Jersey, USA. He is the Project Officer for the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems in the area of Advanced Communication Systems, under DST, Government of India. He has been Principal Investigator for multiple sponsored projects from Intel, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Motorola Research, Tejas Networks, Nokia, and the Government of India, in areas such as Broadband Wireless MAC/QoS/Energy-saving and IMS. His main research interests include IoT and Wireless Access Networks—specifically MAC, QoS, and power saving. Dr. Das received his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. Annappa is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK), Surathkal, Mangalore. He was Co-coordinator for the ISRO-RESPOND sponsored R&D project titled “Customized Reconfigurable Platform for Image/Video Compression Based on Deep Learning Algorithms for Hyperspectral Images.” He also served as Coordinator for the SERB-DST sponsored project “Characterization and Identification of Dialects in the Kannada Language,” and for the MHRD-sponsored project “Design and Evaluation of an Object-Oriented Verification Approach for Distributed Systems.” Additionally, he coordinated the VSSC-ISRO-RESPOND project “Parallel Genetic Algorithm in VLSI Testing.” All the above projects have been successfully completed. M.V. Vijayakumar is currently a Professor and Head of the Department of Information Science and Engineering at Dr. Ambedkar Institute of Technology, Bangalore. Previously, he served as the Founder Director of Research at New Horizon Research Foundation, working with four principals. He has also held the position of Professor and Head of the Department of Information Science and Engineering at New Horizon College of Engineering, Bangalore.
