User:Yvedula

GANTI PRASADA RAO is an electrical engineering and systems science scholar, researcher, and academician. He is well known in the fields of Systems and Control in general, and in particular applications of piecewise constant orthogonal functions and identification of continuous time systems. After taking voluntary retirement as Professor of Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in 1997 he has been actively associated with the development of (1) Encyclopedia of Desalination and Water Resources (DESWARE) (http://www.desware.net) and (2) Encyclopedia of Life support Systems (EOLSS) (http://www.eolss.net). He is presently a member of the UNESCO-EOLSS Joint Committee responsible for the latter and an independent consultant.

Early Life and Education
He was born in Seethanagaram, Andhra Pradesh, India, on August 25, 1942. He had early schooling in Parvatipuram, Bobbili, Sompeta, and Vizianagaram. During his school days he was called a prodigy. He began to write poetry in Telugu from the age 9 and was said by many of his teachers and contemporaries as one who learns or gets anything by heart in one reading. He has not published any of his school time works. About 300 poems of his own composition of Allasaani Peddana’s Manucharitramu are recently found in some old family articles. According to him they were somewhat immature although they satisfy all the standards of poetic meter and style. He always held the opinion that poetry must have depth of meaning- not just a how of vocabulary and jargon, and words must not be disfigured to fit into the poetic meter. He received the best poet award in 1957 from Bhadriraju Krishnamurthy in Vizianagaram for extempore Telugu poetry. He showed much talent also in drawing, clay modeling but did not take them seriously. He focused more on his professional studies since he entered the Government College of Engineering at Kakinada. Only in 1964 at IIT Kharagpur his friends forced him to display some of his sketches and clay models in a campus exhibition. Thereafter his work has been mainly in his professional line.

He received the B.E. degree in Electrical Engineering from Andhra University, India in 1963, with first class and high honors. He received the M.Tech. (Control Systems Engineering) and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1965 and 1970 respectively, both from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India.

Research and Teaching
From July 1969 to October 1971, he was with the Department of Electrical Engineering, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, India as an Assistant Professor. In October 1971 he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Kharagpur as an Assistant Professor and was a Professor there from May 1978 to June 1997. From May 1978 to August 1980, he was the Chairman of the Curriculum Development Cell (Electrical Engineering) established by the Government of India at IIT Kharagpur. From October 1975 to July 1976, he was with the Control Systems Centre, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), Manchester, England, as a Commonwealth Postdoctoral Research Fellow. In the years 1982, 1983, 1985, 1991, 2003, 2004, and 2007 he visited the Lehrstuhl für Elektrische Steuerung und Regelung, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany as a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He visited the Fraunhofer Institut für Rechnerarchitectkur und Softwaretchnik (FIRST) Berlin in the years 2003, 2004 2007. He was a visiting professor in 2003 at University Henri Poincare, Nancy, France, and Royal Society Visiting Professor at Brunel University, UK in 2007. During 1992-1996 he was Scientific Advisor to the Directorate of Power and Desalination Plants, Water and Electricity Department, Government of Abu Dhabi and the International Foundation for Water Science and Technology where he worked in the field of desalination plant control. He is presently a Member of the UNESCO-EOLSS Joint Committee.

In the early 1970s when the whole world was ‘going-completely-digital’, he took the path of continuous time models for identification of dynamical systems and developed techniques which are now used in the MATLAB compatible CONtinuous Time System IDentification (CONTSID)( http://www.iris.cran.uhp-nancy.fr/contsid/ ) Toolbox Developed by Hughes Garnier at the University of Henri Poincare in France. The importance of these identification methods is evident from the many applications in the fields such as gene expression mapping, etc.

He gave several special lectures including the Faraday Memorial Lecture, on 22 September 2006 at Hyderabad under the auspices of the IEEE. His recent lectures are characterized by transdisciplinarity-a tendency to see hidden relations among seemingly different fields of knowledge. One of the popular topics in this series is his own justification of the importance of the ancient Hindu concepts of zero and number systems and he shows how these concepts can be viewed as the pillars of the world of mathematics.

He has authored/coauthored four books: Piecewise Constant Orthogonal Functions And Their Applications to Systems and Control, Identification of Continuous Dynamical Systems- The Poisson Moment Functional (PMF) Approach (with D.C. Saha), Generalised Hybrid Orthogonal Functions and their Applications in Systems and Control (with A. Patra) all the three published by Springer in 1983, 1983 and 1996 respectively, and Identification of Continuous Systems (with H. Unbehauen) Published by North Holland in 1987. He is Co-Editor (with N.K. Sinha) of Identification of Continuous Systems - Methodology and Computer Implementation, Kluwer, 1991. He has authored/coauthored over 150 research papers.

In addition to being a member of the Editorial Boards of several International research journals, he was Guest Editor for certain Special Issues. He organized many Invited Sessions in the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) (http://www.ifac-control.org/ ) He is co-editor (with Achim Sydow) of the book series “Numerical Insights Series” published by Taylor and Francis.

Travel and Other Activities
He travels widely and keeps records of his visits in photos and videos. In one of his Safari travels in Tanzania he was accompanied by his friend Gollapudi Maruthi Rao, a famous journalist, writer, dramatist, film actor who wrote an illuminating and thought provoking travelogue “Teerthayaatra (Tanzania Travelogue)” (http://www.koumudi.net/books/tanzania_travelog_koumudi.pdf )

He is a patron of Pravasandhra Navya Kala Parishat, Kharagpur (WB) India an organization that is dedicated to promoting literary and performing arts in Telugu. Every year this organization organizes National Level competitions in Telugu Drama. He instituted scholarships for in memory of his father Ganti Venkatappadu at Vasavi Engineering College, Hyderabad (http://www.vce.ac.in/  ), India.

Awards and Honours
He received several academic awards including the IIT Kharagpur Silver Jubilee Research Award 1985, The Systems Society of India Award 1989, International Desalination Association Best Paper Award 1995 and Honorary Professorship of the East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai.

The International Foundation for Water Science and Technology has established the ‘Systems and Information Laboratory’ in the Electrical Engineering Department at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in his honor.

He is a Life Fellow of The Institution of Engineers (India), Life Member Systems Society of India, Indian Society for Technical Education, Fellow of The Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers (India), Fellow of IEEE (USA) and a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering.

Personal Life
He married Meenakshi (Vedula) on 16 May 1963. Mrs. Meenakshi Ganti wrote a unique book SHAAKA PAAKAM- VEGETARIAN CULINARY CULTURE OF TELUGU (ANDHRA) DRAAVIDA COMMUNITY OF SOUTH INDIA, UNESCO-Eolss Publishers Co. Ltd., Oxford, United Kingdom Information on this title: www.eolss.net/eBooks ISBN- 978-1-84826-253-9	(e-Book Adobe Reader) ISBN- 978-1-84826-703-9 (Print (Full Color Edition)) The Gantis have two daughters, one son and three grandchildren.