Vivek Borkar

Vivek Shripad Borkar (born 1954) is an Indian electrical engineer, mathematician and an Institute chair professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. He is known for introducing analytical paradigm in stochastic optimal control processes and is an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies viz. the Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and the National Academy of Sciences, India. He also holds elected fellowships of The World Academy of Sciences, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Indian National Academy of Engineering and the American Mathematical Society. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Engineering Sciences in 1992. He received the TWAS Prize of the World Academy of Sciences in 2009.

Biography

Vivek S. Borkar, born on 19 September 1954 in the Indian state of Maharashtra, graduated in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 1976 and moved to the US where he pursued his master's studies in systems and control engineering at Case Western Reserve University to obtain an MS degree in 1977. Subsequently, he enrolled for doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley at the laboratory of Pravin Varaiya and secured a PhD for his thesis, Identification and Adaptive Control of Markov Chains, in 1980.

After his studies at University of California, Borkar moved to the Netherlands and worked as a visiting scientist at the University of Twente for one year. His work is reported to have assisted in bettering the understanding of Stochastic control issues and elucidated adaptive control schemes with regard to asymptotic optimality. He has worked on Distributed computation, Multiple timescales, Approximation and learning algorithms, Multiagent problems and Small noise limits and developed a protocol which used conditional version of importance sampling for the estimation of Markov chain averages; the scheme was later confirmed by a team of scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His researches have been documented in several peer-reviewed articles; and Google Scholar, an online article repository of scientific articles has listed 373 of them. Besides, he has published 5 books viz. Optimal control of diffusion processes, Probability Theory: An Advanced Course, Stochastic Approximation: A Dynamical Systems Viewpoint, Hamiltonian Cycle Problem and Markov Chains and Ergodic Control of Diffusion Processes. He has also contributed chapters to several books edited by others and has delivered a number of invited or keynote addresses including the address on Control and Optimization at the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Madrid in August 2006

Borkar has been associated with several science journals as an editor or a member of their editorial boards which included SIAM Journal of Control and Optimization, Systems and Control Letters, Journal of Indian Institute of Science, Sadhana; Proceedings of Indian Academy of Sciences (Engineering Science), Applicationes Mathematicae of Polish Academy of Sciences and Indian Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics.

Awards and honors Three of Borkar's papers have won awards, starting with Best Transactions Paper Award of the IEEE Control Systems Society in 1982, followed by the Best Paper Award of Value Tools in 2008 and Best Paper Award of IFIP Wireless Days in 2009. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2000 and the Prasant Chandra Mahalanobis Medal of the Indian National Science Academy in 2008. The World Academy of Sciences selected him for the TWAS Prize in 2009. He became an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy in 1996 and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers followed suit in 2002. Two years later, the Indian National Academy of Engineers In between, he received the J. C. Bose National Fellowship of the Department of Science and Technology. The award orations delivered by Borkar include Abdi Memorial Lecture of Ramanujan Mathematical Society in 2006 and M. S. Huzurbazar Memorial Lecture of Bombay Mathematical Colloquium in 2012.

Selected bibliography Books

Articles