Ragunathan "Raj" Rajkumar (born 1963) is the George Westinghouse Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, and its county seat. It is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, second-most populous city in Pennsylvania (after Philadelphia) and the List of Un ...

. He is also affiliated with the Robotics Institute and the Heinz School of Information Systems and Public Policy at

. He also serves as the director of the Metro21 Smart Cities Institute and as the director of the Mobility21 USDOT National University Transportation Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He also leads the General Motors-CMU Connected and Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Laboratory (CAD-CRL), and the Real-Time and Multimedia Systems Lab (RTML) there. Rajkumar is considered to be a pioneer of the domain of connected and autonomous vehicles. He led the Systems Engineering group within CMU's Tartan Racing team, which won the 2007

DARPA Urban Challenge The third driverless car competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge was commonly known as the DARPA Urban Challenge. It took place on November 3, 2007 at the site of the now-closed George Air Force Base (currently used as Southern California Log ...

. He was also a member of the team's 3-member executive committee which oversaw and facilitated the successful participation in and eventual winning of the competition. His work on automated vehicles has been widely covered in the media including TV, radio, online media and in print (newspapers and magazines). He is a primary force behind the global cyber-physical systems community whose flagship event is the Cyber-Physical Systems Week held annually to bring together CPS practitioners and researchers around the world. CPS Week attracts experts from the domains of the Internet of Things, embedded real-time systems, sensor networks, hybrid control systems, and CPS applications. He started the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS) in 2010, and this flagship conference for the global CPS community has become a highlight of CPS Week.

Biography

Rajkumar was born in

Salem, Tamil Nadu Salem () is a major city in Salem district, located on the banks of the Thirumanimutharu river in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu surrounded by mountains. Salem is the List of cities in Tamil Nadu by population, fifth largest urban agglomerati ...

, India in 1963. He graduated from Holy Cross Matriculation School in Salem in 1978, completed his Pre-University Course at

Loyola College, Chennai Loyola College is a government aided private Catholic higher education institution run by the Society of Jesus in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. It was founded in 1925 by the France, French Jesuits, Jesuit priest, Francis Bertram, along with other ...

in 1979, and received his B.E. (Hons) in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the

University of Madras The University of Madras is a public university, public State university (India), state university in Chennai (Madras), Tamil Nadu, India. Established in 1857, it is one of the oldest and most prominent universities in India, incorporated by an ...

at the PSG College of Technology,

Coimbatore Coimbatore (Tamil: kōyamputtūr, ), also known as Kovai (), is one of the major Metropolitan cities of India, metropolitan cities in the States and union territories of India, Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It is located on the banks of the Noyy ...

in 1984. He subsequently received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from

in 1986 and 1989 respectively. He was a Research Staff Member at

IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research. Its main laboratory is in Yorktown Heights, New York, 38 miles (61 km) north of New York City. It also operates facilities in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Albany, ...

in Yorktown Heights, and then at the

Software Engineering Institute Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Founded in 1984, the institute is now sponsored by the Uni ...

at Carnegie Mellon University. He then became a faculty member in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University before moving back to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

Awards

Rajkumar was named a

Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers , the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and ot ...

(IEEE) in 2012. He was picked to become a Member of the

National Academy of Inventors The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) is a US non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging inventors in academia, following the model of the National Academies of the United States. It was founded at the University of South Florida in 201 ...

(NAI) in 2016. In 2015, he was a co-winner of the

IEEE Simon Ramo Medal Through its awards program, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers recognizes contributions that advance the fields of interest to the IEEE. For nearly a century, the IEEE Awards Program has paid tribute to technical professionals w ...

. He was given the ''Outstanding Technical Achievement and Leadership Award'' by the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems in 2009. He became a ''Distinguished Member'' of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

in 2007.

Entrepreneurship

He founded Ottomatika, Inc. in December 2013 to develop and market a complete software stack for autonomous vehicles (AVs). The company was acquired in July 2015 by Delphi, which then became Aptiv after a split.

Books

*"Synchronization in Real-Time Systems: A Priority Inheritance Approach", Springer Verlag, August 1991. *"Cyber-Physical Systems", Addison-Wesley, 2017. Co-authored with Dionisio de Niz and Mark Klein. *"If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?"

References

External links

Personal site

Academic Metro21 Smart Cities Institute

Mobility21 National University Transportation Center

T-SET National University Transportation Center
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rajkumar, Ragunathan Fellows of the IEEE Living people Carnegie Mellon University faculty Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering alumni American roboticists 1963 births DARPA Grand Challenge Indian roboticists Educators from Tamil Nadu American people of Indian Tamil descent People from Salem, Tamil Nadu American people of Indian descent