Narayana Murthy introduces the jury chairs for Infosys Prize 2017

Thank you, Dinesh. Thank you, boner. I'm extremely happy to introduce our jury chairs that have selected the winners of the Infosys Prize 2017. These are a set of most distinguished individuals. The first is, of course, the jury chair for Engineering and Computer Science, Professor Pradeep Khosla, who is the Chancellor of the University of California, San Diego, United States. Professor Khosla previously served as Dean of the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He's the recipient of several awards, including the ASME George Washington Award for Education in 1999, the W. Wallace McDowell Award from IEEE Computer Society in 2001, and in 2012, Professor Khosla was named one of the 50 most influential Indian Americans by the magazine Silicon India. He is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, United States. The chair of the jury for Humanities is Professor Amartya Sen. He is the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, United States. Until 2004, Professor Sen was the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He has served as President of the Econometric Society, the American Economic Association, the Indian Economic Association, and of course, the International Economic Association. Professor Sen's awards include Bharat Ratna, of course, Commander of the Legion of Honor from France, the National Humanities Medal from the United States, the Ordem do Mérito Científico from Brazil, Honorary Companion of Honour from the UK, the Aztec Eagle Medal from Mexico, the Edinburgh Medal from the UK, the George Marshall Award from the United States, the Eisenhower Medal from the United States, and of course, the Nobel Prize in Economics. The chair of the Life Sciences jury is Professor Inder Verma. Professor Verma is the American Cancer Society Professor and the first incumbent of the Irwin M. Jacobs Chair in Exemplary Life Sciences in the Laboratory of Genetics at the Jonas Salk Institute for Biological Studies, United States. Dr. Verma is one of the leading authorities on the development of viruses for gene therapy vectors. He has been awarded the NIH Outstanding Investigator Award in 1988. Dr. Verma is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, United States, Institute of Medicine, United States, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, Third World Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Associate of the Indian National Academy of Sciences. Coming to the Mathematical Sciences jury, Professor S. R. S. Varadhan is the chair. Professor Varadhan is the Frank J. Gould Professor of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, United States. Professor Varadhan's awards and honors include the National Medal of Science in 2010 from US President Barack Obama. It is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on scientists, engineers, and inventors. He's also the winner of the Abel Prize in 2007, the Leroy P. Steele Prize in 1996, the Margaret and Herman Sokol Award of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at New York University in 1995, and of course, the well-known Bôcher Memorial Prize in 1994. Coming to the Physical Sciences jury, it is headed by Professor Shrinivas Kulkarni, who is the George Ellery Hale Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, Caltech, US. Professor Kulkarni's primary interests are the study of compact objects like neutron stars and gamma-ray bursts, and the search for extrasolar planets through interferometric and adaptive techniques. Professor Kulkarni has been awarded the Alan T. Waterman Prize of the National Science Foundation, a Fellowship from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, a Presidential Investigator Award from the NSF, and the Helen B. Warner Award of the American Astronomical Society. He has also won the Jansky Prize of the Associated Universities, Incorporated. Professor Kulkarni was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994, a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2001, and a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 2003. In 2017, he won the Dan David Prize for his contribution to the emerging field of time-domain astronomy. Now coming to the Social Sciences, this jury is headed by Professor Kaushik Basu, who is Professor of Economics and C. Marks Professor of International Studies at Cornell University, United States. He's also a former Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank. Professor Kaushik Basu is Professor of Economics and the C. Marks Professor of International Studies at Cornell University, as I said before. He's the former Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank. Prior to joining the World Bank, he served as Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India. Professor Basu is a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He received the Padma Bhushan as well as the National Mahalanobis Memorial Award. He is President of the International Economic Association. Well, we are happy to share the names of the winners these wonderful people have chosen for the Infosys Prize in 2017. I congratulate every one of the winners of this year's prize. I now invite you to congratulate the winners this year by visiting the Science Foundation's website and submitting a message for them once these names are announced by the various trustees. Thank you very much for joining us here today.