About the Speaker : C. Sidney Burrus received the PhD degree from Stanford University in 1965 after which he joined the faculty at Rice University where he is now Research Professor in ECE, Senior Strategist for Connexions, the Maxfield and Oshman Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Dean Emeritus of the George R. Brown School of Engineering. From 1972 to 1978 he was master of Lovett College and from 1984 to 1992 he was chairman of the ECE Department at Rice. From 1992 to 1998 he was director of the Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI). From 1998 to 2005 he was dean of Engineering. He has been part of the Connexions Project since 1999. In 1975-76 and again in 1979-80 he was a Guest Professor at the University of Erlangen in Germany, and during the academic year 1989-90 he was a Visiting Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT.

Dr. Burrus received teaching awards at Rice in 1969, 74, 75, 76, 80, and 1989, an IEEE S-ASSP Senior Award in 1974, a Senior Alexander von Humboldt Award in 1975, received a Senior Fulbright Fellowship in 1979, was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 1981, the IEEE S-ASSP Technical Achievement Award in 1986, and was a Distinguished Lecturer for the Signal Processing Society and for the Circuits and Systems Society from 1989 through 1992. He was awarded the IEEE S-SP Society Award in 1994, the Millineum Medal in 2000, and the SPIE Wavelet Pioneer Award in 2006. He served on the IEEE Signal Processing Society ADCOM and has coauthored five books and over 200 papers on digital signal processing.

Dr. Burrus has been conducting research in digital signal processing (DSP) for more than 30 years at Rice. His interests are in digital filter design and implementation, and in efficient signal processing algorithms. Significant work is being done in both time and frequency domain specifications for FIR and IIR filters. The design methods focuses on efficient approximation algorithms, and the implementation uses block processing, distributed arithmetic, and transform techniques. Recent work has been on constrained least squared approximation, iterative reweighted least squares algorithms, and new exchange algorithms for Chebyshev approximations. The results of the DSP group's research on filter design are used in commercial filter design systems and are described in Burrus' book on digital filter design.

About the Speaker : Dr. Shubhalaxmi Kher is internationally recognized for her contributions to engineering education and research at various institutions in India and USA. Dr. Kher has a BE (81), ME(89), and Ph. D(97), in Electronics Engineering from Devi Ahilya University, Indore, India. She has over 24 years of academic teaching and research experience in soft computing applications, wireless sensor networks, and bioinformatics. Her diverse academic and research experience includes 4 years at SATI, Vidisha, India, 14 years at SGS institute of technology and Science, Indore including 3 years as chair of Information Technology, about an year at Oakland University, MI, over 4 years at Iowa State University and about 3 years at Arkansas State University. Dr. Kher is recognized for her accomplishments in many ways. She received award for her outstanding professional contributions in organizing ICAUTO '95 at SGS institute of Technology and Science, Indore. She is a Life Fellow of IETE India since 2000, Senior member IEEE, USA since 2000 and member of WIE, Life Fellow of Institute of Engineers, India (IE) since 2010, Life member of Indian Society for Technical Education (ISTE) since 1987 and chartered Engineer of the Institution of Engineers, India . She is actively involved in IEEE activities for the last 20 years and founded IEEE MP subsection in year 2002, served as Treasurer of IEEE Central Iowa Section 2008, Chair of IEEE MP Subsection, India for 2002, 03, and 04.

About the Speaker : Dr. Arun Kumar did his B.Tech, M.Tech and PhD, all in Electrical Engineering, from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur . His doctoral thesis was titled "Nonlinear dynamical analysis and predictive coding of speech". He was a Visiting Researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara , from 1994 to 1996 , prior to joining the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1997 . He is a recipient of the Young Scientist Award of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI)