Uday B Desai received his BTech degree from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, (1974), MS degree from the State University of New York, Buffalo (1976), and PhD degree from The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA (1979), all in Electrical Engineering. From 1979 to 1984 he was an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at Washington State University, Pullman and an Associate Professor there (1984-87). Since 1987 he has been a Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at IIT- Bombay. He was Dean of Students at IIT-Bombay (2000-02) and has held Visiting positions at Arizona State University; Purdue University; Stanford University; and EPFL, Lausanne. He was also the Director of HP-IITM R& D Lab at IIT-Madras (2002-04).

Academic and Research Achievements: Professor Desai works in the area of signal processing, image processing and wireless communication. He pioneered the concept of balance stochastic realization that has become a routine part of many model reduction and control algorithms. He exploited Markov random field models (MRF) for developing new image restoration and image interpretation algorithms. He also developed a relation between MRF models and belief networks, and exploited this for image understanding. Later on he devoted his attention to wireless communication, wireless sensor networks (WSN) and multihop networks (MHN). He developed, for MHN, the novel algorithms for route discovery and route resilient protocols and also developed a WSN technology for landslide detection. A novel method for multi-user detection was also developed by him by introducing the concept of minimum probability of error-based detectors. He has mentored fourteen PhDs and over eighty MTechs.

Other Contributions: Professor Desai started the SPANN Lab at IIT-Bombay, which till today is doing cutting edge research in signal processing and wireless communication. He has developed new courses on artificial neural networks, adaptive signal processing, computer vision and ICT (Information and Communication Technology) for socioeconomic development. He is on the Technical Advisory Board of several companies.

Awards and Honours: Professor Desai is a Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering, recipient of the Ram Lal Wadhwa Gold Medal from the Institution of Electrical and Telecommunication Engineers, and the Excellence in Teaching Award from IIT-Bombay. He is a Distinguished lecturer for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer Communication Society.