Guest Lectures

History has been witness to the fact that genius inspires genius. Our line up for last year consisted of men who changed the way we live and think. From the head of CERN to a man whose cryptographic ingenuity changed the face of e-mail, from economy experts to space travelers to even a potential time traveler, the congregation of the world's greatest minds agglomerated at NIT,Trichy.

So, why peer into the future when you can be the future!

Mr. Kalyan Banerjee

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Mr. Kalyan Banerjee is co-founder of and responsible for Learning at MindTree. MindTree is the best mid-sized design services and IT consulting company, consistently ranked among the best places to work for and among most admired knowledge enterprises in the country.
Dr. Loren Acton

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For the first time in the history of Pragyan, we will witness a talk by an astronaut! Dr. Loren Acton received his PhD in Solar Physics from the University of Colorado in 1965. He then was employed at the Lockheed Palo Alto Research laboratory. In 1985, Acton was selected as a Payload Specialist in the STS-51-F mission on board the Space Shuttle Challenger. Overall he clocked nearly two hundred hours in space.
Dr. John C Mather

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Dr John C Mather of the Goddard Space Research Centre of NASA and head of the COBE [Cosmic Background Explorer] Project is a man who is playing a key role in answering this question. Having won virtually every academic honour throughout his career as a student and researcher, he topped it all off with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2006 for measuring the intensity of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation [CMBR] that permeates the entire universe and currently forms the basis of the Big Bang theory and all currently accepted models of the evolution of the universe.
Dr. Josh Bongard

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Dr Josh Bongard's resilient machine project has been recognised by Esquire magazine as one of the “Six Ideas That Will Change The World" and he is named in the annual list of “Young Innovators" by Technology Review magazine. A pioneer in the field of robotics, Dr Josh Bongard is well known for his work on evolutionary robotics using the concept of continuous self modeling which has eventually opened up new challenging areas of research. He has also implemented a system called, Artificial Otogeny that ‘grows a virtual egg into a fully formed virtual robot.’
Dr. Peter Norvig

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Dr. Peter Norvig is the Director of Research at Google Inc, a position he has held since 2001. In between this period he was also the Director of Search Quality, which means he was the manager of record responsible for answering more queries than anyone else in the history of the world.
Mr. Thomas Kuruvilla

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If people are to be judged by their contribution to civil society and not just to science or technology in general, Thomas Kuruvilla ranks right up there with many of the stalwarts. Thomas Kuruvilla is the Managing Director of the Middle East operations of Arthur D. Little, one of the worlds top consultancy firms. Having completed his education from Melbourne, Mr Kuruvilla has overseen and played key roles in the development of various industrial fields in Asia.
Dr. Ashok Rao

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With over 30 years of experience in energy conversion technologies and a Ph.D. from the University of California for research in advanced power systems, Dr Ashok Rao has been involved with the design and development of a variety of energy conversion processes for electric power generation using gas turbines, fuel cells etc. He is a visionary who is known for his pioneering work in the advancement of energy efficient systems.
Mr. Manish Tripathi

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Manish Tripathi is the Director, Information Technology and an honorary director of Mumbai's dabbawalas, a 125-year-old organization in Mumbai, delivering food to the office workers in the city. These workers who charge an extremely small nominal fee deliver with utmost punctuality. Even BBC featured a documentry on this industry which continues to grow at a rate of 5–10% per year.