Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, popularly known as the People's President, was the 11th President of India, serving from 2002 to 2007.
As an aeronautical engineer, Dr. Kalam made significant contribution to develop India's first indigenous Satellite Launch Vehicle; he was responsible for building capability in critical technologies through networking with multiple institutions.
Dr Kalam was the Secretary to the Government of India (Department of Defence Research & Development), Scientific Adviser to Defence Minister and Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India.
In his literary pursuit, Dr. Kalam has written many books; “Wings of Fire”, "India 2020 - A Vision for the New Millennium", "My journey" and "Ignited Minds - Unleashing the power within India" have become household names in India and among the Indian nationals abroad. These books have been translated in many Indian languages.
Dr Kalam was awarded India’s highest civilian award of Bharat Ratna in 1997; he has the unique honor of receiving honorary doctorates from 30 universities and institutions. On April 29, 2009, he became the first Asian to be bestowed with the Hoover Medal, America's top engineering prize, for his outstanding contribution to public service.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web.
Currently, he is the 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he also heads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG). He is also a Professor in the Electronics and Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, UK.
He is also the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. He is a founding Director of the Web Science Trust (WST) launched in 2009 to promote research and education in Web Science, the multidisciplinary study of humanity connected by technology.
He is also a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, launched in 2009 to fund and coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.
Christos H. Papadimitriou
Christos H. Papadimitriou is C. Lester Hogan Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Before joining Berkeley in 1996 he taught at Harvard, MIT, Athens Polytechnic, Stanford, and UCSD. He has written five textbooks and many articles on algorithms and complexity, and their applications to optimization, databases, AI, economics, evolution, and the Internet. He holds a PhD from Princeton, and honorary doctorates from ETH (Zurich), the Universities of Macedonia (Thessaloniki), Athens, Cyprus, and Patras. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of the ACM. His second novel "Logicomix" has been translated in over 20 languages. |