From these shaky and fondly recalled beginnings, Kailath, now Professor Emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford, has charted an astounding career.
As he sits in his office at Stanford, which is bursting with piles of papers and hundreds of academic books on mathematics or engineering gathered over his 40 year career, Kailath recounts how after undergraduate education in India, a friend’s father counseled him to go to America.
Harvard and MIT accepted the 22-year-old, who had clearly left his early trouble with mathematics far behind. In 1957 he arrived at MIT, on of a quota of 30 international students in the engineering department, of which only two were allowed to be from India. He would be the first person born in India to receive a Ph.D. from MIT, preceded among Indians only by Amar Bose, founder of consumer electronics giant Bose Corp, who was born in America.
“My work began to get attention,” Kailath says modestly. IIT Kanpur was just being founded and he applied for a job there but was turned down because he was only 26. It would be IIT’s loss and Stanford’s gain. A year and a half later, Kailath got a job at Stanford, which had itself trumped an offer from MIT.
When he arrived at Stanford in 1963, the U.S. government, frightened by the launch of the Sputnik satellite by the Russians in 1957, was pumping a lot of money into engineering. The department was growing rapidly and he became a professor in only four years. It was an astounding time to be at Stanford, which was nothing like the internationally recognized institution it is today. Kailath was interviewed by Fred Terman, the ambitious dean of the engineering school, who is the man that brought together Hewlett and Packard, and is widely regarded as the veritable “founder of Silicon Valley.” Kailath recalls how Terman created unconventional policies, such as encouraging professors to do consulting, and granting professors the rights to patents, that would eventually lead to the nexus between technology entrepreneurship and university research for which Stanford is now famous. And Kailath ended up in the middle of it all.
When asked about what it was like to experience the genesis of the Silicon Valley technology economy he recalls, “I was slow to realize it.” He remembers the early days. “We lived in Sunnyvale and it was all orchards.” Now Sunnyvale is at the heart of Silicon Valley’s urban sprawl. Kailath was one of a handful of Indians in town. “If you saw someone in a sari in the street you ran after them to say hello,” he remembers. “We knew the four or five Indian families south of Stanford.”
Kailath’s groundbreaking work is on what he calls the “paper and pencil” side of electrical engineering — the more theoretical and mathematical work, as opposed to the physics-based work involving sophisticated labs that is also part of the electrical engineering field. It is a type of work that is fast gaining importance in the world of technology business.
Kailath would get his opportunity to participate in the budding technology economy in 1980. A student of his, Narendra Gupta, was working with a company that was doing engineering studies for the government. He remembers discussing with Gupta, “Why can’t we do this?” So Kailath, Gupta and his wife Vineeta started Integrated Systems and began work on some government contracts that both Kailath and Gupta had. Soon they realized that they were doing jobs faster because they were using software. So they built a software design package for control engineering. The company went public in 1990, and used its stock to acquire a company in embedded software, which became its focus.
Kailath was also involved in founding Numerical Technologies (Nasdaq: NMTC) with Y.C. (Buno) Pati in 1995. His latest project, Excess Bandwidth, which also grew out of research, was in the DSL space, and was acquired by Virata in 2000.
But soft-spoken Kailath’s views on the connection between research and business go beyond just turning research into commercialized technology. He pulls a few books that he has authored from his shelf and opens them up on the table. The pages are littered with complex equations that few can even begin to understand. This is the highly theoretical and mathematical base material he has spent his career developing. It is only more recently, with advances in the technology world, that such theoretical elements have become highly relevant to commercial applications. What was once “blue-sky” research and theory is finding applications in everything from communications to semiconductor manufacturing. But the nexus between commercial technology and research that Terman instigated at Stanford in the 1950s has escalated all over America to the point that there may now be less room for purely theoretical research.
“The ambitions have changed. There is pressure on academic research to be relevant,” Kailath explains. He remembers, “In the mid 80s I would say, ‘Look I think we have a research project that could lead to a venture’ and people would resist it.” No longer.
The irony is that a focus on relevance and practical applications is not what led to the current relevance and power of Kailath’s own research. He explains “We can’t forget that a certain number of people have to be outside the straight jacket,” meaning that some people still need to be out doing futuristic research. Advanced theoretical research is, Kailath suggests, an edge in terms of building a technology business, because it is much more difficult for competitors to catch up to. “Academics are five to 10 years ahead,” he explains.
So, despite the appeal of millions to be made in the high-tech industry, graduate students still come to engineering schools to get involved in advanced theoretical endeavors. And it is those graduate students, many of them Indian, that will drive the kind of advanced thinking that has exemplified Kailath’s career. He calls his department “an intelligence amplifier.” The product will be the seeds of future world-changing innovations. Kailath, the pioneer, has seen it happen before his eyes.
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