Ganti Prasada Rao

GANTI PRASADA RAO (born 25 August 1942) is an Indian author, educator and researcher, well known in the field of Systems and Control in general, and as a pioneer in the applications of special orthogonal functions and Identification of Continuous-time Systems. For a comparative assessment of identification algorithms with continuous-time and discrete-time models, the Rao-Garnier test system is a bench mark.
 
In the early 1970s when the scientific community was ‘going-completely-digital’ in an indirect way via discrete-time models, he suggested the direct path of continuous time models for identification of dynamical systems and developed techniques which outperform the indirect methods. These direct methods are now used in the MATLAB compatible CONtinuous Time System IDentification (CONTSID) Toolbox Developed at the Université de Lorraine in France. The importance of these identification methods is evident from their compatibility with real world physical systems.
After teaching and research in PSG College of Technology Coimbatore (1969-71)and Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur since 1971, he was invited in 1992 as Scientific Advisor by the Directorate of Power and Desalination Plants, Water and Electricity Department, Government of Abu Dhabi and the International Foundation for Water Science and Technology where he led a research team on desalination plant control and became a Member of the UNESCO-EOLSS Joint Committee in the UNESCO-EOLSS Project in 1996. In the course of this ongoing project under the auspices of the UNESCO, he has been actively associated with the development of (1) Encyclopedia of Desalination and Water Resources (DESWARE) and (2) Encyclopedia of Life support Systems (EOLSS). 
Rao is a patron of Pravasandhra Navya Kala Parishat, Kharagpur (WB) India, an organization that is dedicated to promoting literary and performing arts in Telugu. Every year this organization organizes National Level competitions in Telugu Drama; he built the North Wing complex of the organization in memory of his father. He established two scholarships in memory of his parents for students of the EEE Department in VCE Hyderabad.
Ganti Prasada Rao was born in Seethanagaram, Andhra Pradesh, India, on August 25, 1942 to Venkatappadu and Rajeswaramma. He had early schooling in Parvatipuram, Bobbili, and Sompeta in Northern Andhra Pradesh, India. During his school days he was regarded as a prodigy was said by many of his teachers and contemporaries as one who could memorize things in a single reading . He began to write poetry in Telugu from the age of 9. He received awards for the best English short story and the best Telugu poetry in 1958 in Maharajah’s College Vizianagaram during his Pre-University Course. He showed much talent in drawing, clay modeling but did not take them seriously. He focused mainly on his professional studies after he became a student in Electrical Engineering at the Government Engineering College, Kakinada, which is now in the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University Kakinada campus and affiliated to the same university. 
Rao received the B.E. degree in Electrical Engineering from Andhra University, India in 1963 in first class and high honors, M.Tech. and Ph.D. degrees in 1965 and 1970 respectively, both from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur. He is listed in the Notable Alumni of the higher educational institutions which he attended Government College of Engineering Kakinada (now Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University College of Engineering) and Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur which also conferred on him its Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2019.
1969 July – 1971 October: Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, India 
1971 October - 1978 May, Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Kharagpur
1978 May – 1997 June: Professor Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Kharagpur 
 
1978 May - 1980 August, Chairman, Curriculum Development Cell (Electrical Engineering) IIT Kharagpur. 
1975 October - 1976 July , Commonwealth Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Control Systems Centre, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), Manchester, England, 
1982-1983, 1985 , 1991, 2003, 2004, and 2007: Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Lehrstuhl für Elektrische Steuerung und Regelung, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany ; 
2003, 2004 2007 Fraunhofer Institut für Rechnerarchitectkur und Softwaretchnik (Fraunhofer Institute - FIRST), Berlin 
2003 Visiting professor Henri Poincaré University, Nancy, France,
 
2007 Royal Society sponsored Visiting Professor, Brunel University, UK.
Dr. Rao has been invited to give lectures around the world. They include the Faraday Memorial Lecture, on 22 September 2006 at Hyderabad under the auspices of the IEEE the Karl Reinisch Memorial Lecture TU Ilmenau, 2007 and GRD Centenary Distinguished Lecture Coimbatore 2014 to mention a few . He has been an invited participant and plenary speaker at many international conferences of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), institutions and conferences such as the, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences Wroclaw, USSR Academy of Sciences Moscow, etc. He was the Keynote Speaker ICSENG 2005, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, August 17-19, 2005. More recently at International Conference on Mathematics in Space and other Applied Sciences (ICMSAS-2019), 29-30 November 2019, Hamirpur, India and the Chief Guest at the International Conference on Advances in Applicable Mathematics, (ICAAM-2020) at Coimbatore, India, February 21-22, 2020.
Some of his lectures are based on his investigations in search of hidden connections in mathematics and among some seemingly different fields of knowledge. One of the popular topics in this series is his own justification of the importance of the ancient Hindu concepts of zero and number systems and he shows how these concepts appear to have influenced the mind set of mathematicians to be viewed as the pillars of the world of mathematics.
• Over 150 papers. (One of his papers on Identification of Continuous-time Systems, published in IET (Former IEE) Control Theory and Applications, Vol.153, Issue 2, March 2006, ranked No.14 among the hundreds of papers published in the journal since 1980, among the top 20 full text downloaded papers- 197 downloads in 2008)
• Piecewise Constant Orthogonal Functions And Their Applications to Systems and Control, Springer in 1983
• Identification of Continuous Dynamical Systems- The Poisson Moment Functional (PMF) Approach (with D.C. Saha) , Springer in 1983
• Generalised Hybrid Orthogonal Functions and their Applications in Systems and Control (with Amit Patra) all the three published by Springer 1996 
• Identification of Continuous Systems (with H. Unbehauen) North Holland, 1987. 
• Co-Editor (with N.K. Sinha) of Identification of Continuous Systems - Methodology and Computer Implementation, Kluwer, 1991. 
• Identification of continuous-time systems- Linear and robust estimation (with Allamaraju Subrahmanyam), CRC, 2019 
• He has authored/coauthored over 150 research papers.
• Rao has written and published an essay in Telugu as a tribute to his teachers
In addition to being a member of the Editorial Boards of several International research journals, he was Guest Editor for certain Special Issues. 
He was Chairman of the Technical Program Committee of National Systems Conference 1989 India, Member of the Technical Program Committees of International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) Symposia on Identification- SYSID-1985, 1988, 1991, 1994 and 1997 and organized Invited Sessions in the IFAC World Congress 1993 and the above mentioned symposia, and gave plenary lectures. 
He is co-editor (with Achim Sydow) of the book series “Numerical Insights Series” published by Taylor and Francis. He was a delegate of the UNESCO at the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in 2002 in Johannesburg, South Africa, World Conference on Science (1999) and World Science Forum (2009) both held in Budapest, Hungary. He is Editor of the CRC Book Series on Engineering Systems and Sustainability. 
He was a specially invited international guest at the 25th Annual Conference of SICE, Osaka, Japan 1993, First Chinese Control conference Taiping, China, 1995, and Chief Guest at the International Conference on Advances in Applicable Mathematics (ICAAM-2020), February 21-22 2020, Coimbatore, India. 
A brief version of his story published in the INAE book “The Mind of an Engineer” is expanded by him into an illustrated autobiography in response to requests and encouragement from friends, colleagues and family members. Part I of this work is complete and part II is underway.
 
Rao received several academic awards including the 
• IIT Kharagpur Silver Jubilee Research Award 1985, 
• The Systems Society of India Award 1989, 
• International Desalination Association Best Paper Award 1995 
• Honorary Professorship of the East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai.
• The International Foundation for Water Science and Technology has established the ‘Systems and Information Laboratory’ in the Electrical Engineering Department at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in his honor.
• IIT Kharagpur Distinguished Alumnus Award 2019.
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Rao is a 
•	Life Fellow of The Institution of Engineers (India), 
•	Life Member Systems Society of India, 
•	Indian Society for Technical Education, 
•	Fellow of The Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers (India), 
•	Fellow of IEEE (USA) and a 
•	Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering.
•	He is on the Advisory Board of The International Institute for General Systems Studies (IIGSS) and has been on the International Advisory Committees of some of its World Congresses
Rao’s hobbies include vegetarian cooking and photography. He traveled with his wife Meenakshi around the world several times and lived in various places since 1975 and all their travels are documented. In one of his Safari travels in Tanzania he was accompanied by his friend Gollapudi Maruthi Rao who wrote a travelogue describing this journey in Telugu “Teerthayaatra (Tanzania Travelogue)” 
Rao married Meenakshi (Vedula) in 1963. They have two daughters- Nagalakshmi and Rajeswari and a son Venkata Lakshminarayana, and three grandchildren from the daughters. Meenakshi’s book “Shaaka Paakam- Vegetarian Culinary Culture Of Telugu (Andhra) Draavida Community Of South India” has been Published under the UNESCO-EOLSS Project as a contribution to the literature on conservation of culture.
Category:Indian scientists
Category:Indian educators
Category:Indian writers