I am the founding Director (from 2008 to 2018) of IIIT-Delhi, where I am currently a Distinguished Professor. The decade at IIIT-Delhi as founding Director have been most satisfying and challenging for me, but deeply satisfying as well – within a decade of being created, IIIT-Delhi was ranked in top 200 BRICS universities, and is highly respected globally Before taking up the responsibility of Director, I was a Chair Professor in Computer Science Department at IIT Delhi, prior to which I spent almost two decades in IIT Kanpur, CS department, including as Head of the Dept. During my tenure as Head we got the building for the CS department built thanks to a generous donation by Mr. NR Narain Murthy – before this, the CS department was housed in the Computer Centre building. From 1985 to 1989, I was an Assistant Professor at University of Maryland College Park – my first academic position. I also served as Interim Vice Chancellor of Delhi Technological University (DTU) for six months in 2014.
I was Vice President and Head Quality at Infosys for two years (1996-1998) on leave from IITK, where I spearheaded Infosys' successful move to high maturity levels of the CMM and for which our team got the Infosys Managerial Award. Out of this experience came the books CMM in Practice, Project Management in Practice, both published by Addison Wesley. These books were quite influential in global software industry and were translated in many different languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French. From 2003 to 2004 I was a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, where I worked on defect analysis and software reliability.
I did my B.Tech. from IIT Kanpur in 1980, MS from Pennsylvania State University, and Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I have authored five books. The Indian edition of the text An Integrated Approach to Software Engineering (Springer, 3 editions) was adjudged the bestselling book and was widely used in India – literally Lacs of students in the country studied this subject using this book. The graduate level book Fault Tolerance in Distributed Computing (Prentice Hall), was one of the first on the topic. My last book was A Concise Approach to Software Engineering, published by Springer and Indian Edition by Wiley.
My main areas of research interest are Software Engineering and now Higher Education. I have served on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Intl. Journal on Empirical Software Engineering, and IEEE Trans. on Services Computing, and am currently a member of the committee for the ACM Prize in Computing. I was instrumental in starting ISOFT, the Indian Chapter of ACM SIGSOFT, and the India Software Engineering Conference (ISEC), a successful research conference. I have been Program or General Chair of conferences like Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC), IEEE Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), India Software Engineering Conference (ISEC), Conf. on Sw Engg Education and Training (CSEET), and Int. Symp. On Software Reliability Engg. (ISSRE). I was the General Chair of 36th Int. Conf on Sw Engg, ICSE (in 2014), which is the largest and perhaps the most reputed research conference in software engineering.
I am a Fellow of the IEEE (Institution of Electronics and Electrical Engineers). I am also a Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineers (INAE), IETE (Institution of Electronics and Telecommunications Engineers), and CSI (Computer Society of India).
I have a blog on Higher Education in India and have written many (over 40) opinion articles on higher education and research and the IT industry in India in in Times of India and Economic Times.
My other interests include birding (am an occasional birder), travelling, listening to music particularly Ghazals, and reading – both non-fiction as well as fiction. As a grad student and young faculty, I used to regularly play tennis and squash, which I has recently restarted after a gap of three decades. For whole of 2019 I am on Sabbatical – during which I travelling and relaxing, and visiting some research centers in Higher Education.
My email address is my last name at iiitd.ac.in. My CV (which has not been updated) can be found here.