Towards a Theory to deal with smartness

No, this is not a theory talk. Neither is it going to be  a talk on AI or deep learning. This work is motivated by the following Observation:  Today if an artifact is not associated with the epithet "smart" it is nothing. We have trouble defining smartness but we seem to know when A is smarter than B. So, what are the attributes of  smartness? Can we give an actionable definition of smartness? This talk will give an experiential report on investigations into these questions.

About the Speaker:

Prof. Krithi Ramamritham has spent almost equal lengths of time at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,   and  at IIT Bombay as a Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

His current research involves applying computational approaches to energy management, based on the SMART principle: Sense Meaningfully, Analyze, and Respond Timely. This work exploits and extends the state of the art in database systems, real-time computing, sensor networks, embedded systems, mobile computing and smart grids.
 
He is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, Indian Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, India, and the Indian National Academy of Engineering. He was honored with a Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa) by the University of Sydney. He is also a recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras. Twice he received the IBM Faculty Award. He received the 2016 Outstanding Technical Contributions and Leadership Award from the IEEE Technical Committee for Real-Time Systems and the Outstanding Service Award from  IEEE's CEDA.

He has served on the Board of Directors of Persistent Systems, Pune, on the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment, and on the Technical Advisory Board of TTTech, Vienna, Austria, Microsoft Research India, and Tata Consultancy Services. 

He has been associated with the editorial board of various journals. These include IEEE Embedded Systems Letters and Springer's Real-Time Systems Journal (Editor-in-Chief), IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Internet Computing, ACM Computing Surveys and the VLDB (Very Large Databases) Journal.
 
He holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Utah. He did his B.Tech (Electrical Engineering) and M.Tech (Computer Science) degrees from IIT Madras. During 2006-2009, he served as Dean (R&D) at IIT Bombay. He also  headed IIT Bombay's new Center for Urban Science and Engineering (CUSE).