Vivek Shripad Borkar (born 1954) is an Indian electrical engineer, mathematician and an Institute chair professor at the

Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay or IITB) is a public research university and technical institute in Powai, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. It is considered as one of the best engineering universities in India and is top rank ...

. 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 The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore was founded by Indian Physicist and Nobel Laureate C. V. Raman, and was registered as a society on 24 April 1934. Inaugurated on 31 July 1934, it began with 65 founding fellows. The first general meet ...

Indian National Science Academy The Indian National Science Academy (INSA) is a national academy in New Delhi for Indian scientists in all branches of science and technology. In August 2019, Dr. Chandrima Shaha was appointed as the president of Indian National Science Acade ...

and the

National Academy of Sciences, India The National Academy of Sciences, India, established in 1930, is the oldest science academy in India. It is located in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh. Prof. Meghnad Saha was the founder president. Fellows *Suddhasatwa Basu * Sudha Bhattacharya * Ch ...

. He also holds elected fellowships of

The World Academy of Sciences The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) is a merit-based science academy established for developing countries, uniting 1,000 scientists in some 70 countries. Its principal aim is to promote scientific capacity and excellence for sustainable deve ...

, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers,

Indian National Academy of Engineering The Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), founded in 1987, comprises India's engineers, engineer-scientists and technologists covering the entire spectrum of engineering disciplines. The Academy is registered under the Societies Reg ...

and the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

. The

Council of Scientific and Industrial Research The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research ( IAST: ''vaigyanik tathā audyogik anusandhāna pariṣada''), abbreviated as CSIR, was established by the Government of India in September 1942 as an autonomous body that has emerged as the ...

, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the

Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology (SSB) is a science award in India given annually by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) for notable and outstanding research, applied or fundamental, in biology, ...

, 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 The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay or IITB) is a public research university and technical institute in Powai, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. It is considered as one of the best engineering universities in India and is top rank ...

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 The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

at the laboratory of

Pravin Varaiya Pravin Pratap Varaiya (29 October 1940 – 10 June 2022) was Nortel Networks Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Varaiya received his B.Sc. from University of Bombay and ...

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 The University of Twente (Dutch: ''Universiteit Twente''; , abbr. ) is a public technical university located in Enschede, Netherlands. The university has been placed in the top 170 universities in the world by multiple central ranking tables. I ...

for one year. On his return to India in 1981, he joined the

TIFR Centre for Applicable Mathematics The TIFR Centre for Applicable Mathematics is part of the School of Mathematics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. The centre originated from the school's efforts since the mid-1970s to develop areas in applicable mathematics. In f ...

, Bengaluru as a fellow where he stayed till his move to the

Indian Institute of Science The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) is a public, deemed, research university for higher education and research in science, engineering, design, and management. It is located in Bengaluru, in the Indian state of Karnataka. The institute was ...

in 1989 as an assistant professor. He served IISc till 1999 and held the post of an associate professor at the time of his appointment at the

Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) is a public deemed research university located in Mumbai, India that is dedicated to basic research in mathematics and the sciences. It is a Deemed University and works under the umbrella of the ...

(TIFR) as a professor (Grade G). He held various ranks of professorship at TIFR such as grades H to I and on his superannuation in 2011 as a Distinguished Professor, he moved to his alma mater, IIT Mumbai, where he holds the position of a chair professor at the School of Technology and Computer Science.

Legacy

Borkar's researches were mainly in the fields of Stochastic control, Learning control theory and random processes and he is known to have introduced a ''new convex analytical paradigm based upon occupation measures''. 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 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

. His researches have been documented in several peer-reviewed articles; and

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes ...

, 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 and the Lecture on ''Probability and Stochastic Processes XI'' organized by

Indian Statistical Institute Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) is a higher education and research institute which is recognized as an Institute of National Importance by the 1959 act of the Indian parliament. It grew out of the Statistical Laboratory set up by Prasanta ...

, Delhi in November 2016. 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 The Polish Academy of Sciences ( pl, Polska Akademia Nauk, PAN) is a Polish state-sponsored institution of higher learning. Headquartered in Warsaw, it is responsible for spearheading the development of science across the country by a society o ...

and ''Indian Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics''. He has served as a member of the executive committee of the Mumbai chapter of IEEE and has been an examiner for doctoral studies at

University of Nice Sophia Antipolis The University of Nice Sophia Antipolis (french: Université Nice Sophia Antipolis) was a university located in Nice, France and neighboring areas. It was founded in 1965 and was organized in eight faculties, two autonomous institutes and an eng ...

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. The

awarded him the

Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology (SSB) is a science award in India given annually by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) for notable and outstanding research, applied or fundamental, in biology, ...

, one of the highest Indian science awards in 1992. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai in 2000 and the Prasant Chandra Mahalanobis Medal of the Indian National Science Academy in 2008.

selected him for the TWAS Prize in 2009. Borkar was elected as a fellow by the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1993 and he received the Homi Bhabha Fellowship in 1995. 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 and the National Academy of Sciences, India elected him as their fellow in 2004 and 2009 respectively; 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

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Articles