Two ex-IIT Madras Graduates in the Valley donate a whopping Rs $1 million to their alma mater

Two alumni of IIT-Madras based in the Silicon Valley have donated a whopping $1 million to fund the Guest Faculty in Computer Science and Engineering so that they could lead research projects.

Their donation was announced at the Visiting Chair Programme during the 42nd international conference on Very Large Data Bases in New Delhi on Wednesday.

The duo - Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayanan - is sponsoring the Visiting Chairs with an aim to enhance teaching efforts, promote lead research on data-driven approaches and attract outstanding young faculty, students, scholars and post doctoral fellows to the institute.

“In order to ensure that the Chairs are of high quality, an advisory committee has been constituted to help the CSE Department in screening and selection of the Chair Professor,” IIT Madras said in a statement.

Meanwhile, three eminent scientists - Prof. Jeffrey Ullman at Stanford University, Prof. Randy Katz at UC-Berkeley and Prof. Hari Balakrishnan at MIT - have already indicated their willingness to serve as Chairs at the launch of the programme. One of them Prof Katz said - “This new Visiting Chair programme will spark a great connection between the international Computer Science research community and one of the leading centres of Computer Science education and research in India. I’m looking forward to an exciting and substantive engagement in this rapidly developing center of the computer science world”.

Meanwhile in his keynote address at the conference, Rajaraman said – “Data-driven approaches are transforming the world we live in. The impact of data and algorithms is being felt in every field of human endeavor — industry, sciences, humanities, and government.”

Harinarayan joined in excitedly – “It gives us great pleasure to enable IIT Madras to contribute to the research work in this field, and join the ranks of the select few institutions that are inventing the future.”

The Visiting Chair will be working closely with faculty at IIT-Madras and engaging in allied fields of research, while also helping the Institute build up capabilities in teaching or co-teaching of UG and graduate courses, co-advising IIT-M students, and assisting in recruitment of post-doctoral fellows.