BENGALURU: Infosys Science Foundation (ISF) on Thursday announced six winners of its annual Infosys Prize. The winners from across the categories - Engineering and Computer Sciences, Humanities, Life Sciences, Mathematical Sciences, Physical Sciences and Social Sciences - will receive a pure gold medal, a citation and a prize purse of USD 1,00,000.
The award for Engineering and Computer Science was given to Sunita Sarawagi, Institute Chair Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, for her research in databases, data mining, machine learning and natural language processing. She has developed information extraction techniques for unstructured data, which further help in efficient handling of queries.
Manu V Devadevan, Assistant Professor, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi, won the award for Humanities. His research includes study of ancient inscriptions from South India.Manjula Reddy, Chief Scientist, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad, won the Life Sciences award for discoveries concerning the structure of cell walls in bacteria. The study has the potential for new class of antibiotics to combat antibiotic resistant microbes.
The Mathematical Sciences award was bagged by Siddhartha Mishra, Professor, Department of Mathematics, ETH Zürich, for his contributions to Applied Mathematics, particularly for designing numerical tools to solve real world problems.G Mugesh, Professor, Department of Inorganic and Physical Chemistry, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), won the Physical Sciences award for his work on chemical synthesis of small molecules and nanomaterials for biomedical applications, which has led to medical advances.
Anand Pandian, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, won the Social Sciences award. He has researched the theory and methods of anthropology. The foundation stated that these names were shortlisted from among 196 nominations.
S D Shibulal, co-founder, Infosys Ltd, and president of Infosys Science Foundation, and N R Narayana Murthy, Founder of Infosys, Trustee of Infosys Science Foundation were present.