Sankar Basu

Sankar Basu is a member of NSF scientific staff and a program Director. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He came to NSF from the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. He received a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, served on the faculty of Stevens Institute of Technology, and was a visiting senior scientist Naval Underwater Systems Center, CT. He visited the Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, and the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) for extended periods. During the summer of 2012 he was a science advisor to the US Embassy in Berlin, Germany as a State Department Embassy Science Fellow. In recent years, he has also visited the Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Poland.

At NSF his primary responsibilities include Micro and Nano- electronic systems and architectures, Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), along with machine learning and neuromorphic hardware design. He has been involved in several interdisciplinary programs at NSF, e.g., National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), Interactions between Mathematics and Computer Science (MCS), Science of Learning Centers (SLC), and the Information Technology Research (ITR) program. Over the years, he played leading role in several cross-agency joint initiatives; most recent among them is the "Energy Efficient Computing: from Devices to Architectures" with Semiconductor Research Corporation and the "Real Time Machine Learning Program" with DARPA. In the past, he also served on the National Science and Technology (NSTC) Committee, Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on Biometrics, and more recently co-chaired an interagency committee on Grand Challenges in Computing.

Dr. Basu's own research interests had been in the analytical aspects circuits, systems and signal processing. At IBM, he worked on statistical machine learning, speech and multimedia data retrieval, and has extensively published on filter synthesis, image processing, nonlinear modeling techniques. An author/coauthor of over one hundred refereed publications including coediting two special volumes on Wavelets and Filter Banks, and a book Advances in Learning Theory: Methods, Models, and Applications, he has given several keynote speeches at the International Conferences and Workshops in the general areas of Signal and Systems Theory, and Computing Hardware design. He holds 10 US Patents.

He was the Editor-in-Chief (EiC) for IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems  - Parts I & II for a period of 6 years, and has served in editorial capacities for a number of publications including the Proceedings of the IEEE, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, the Journal of Applied Signal Processing of the European Association of Signal Processing, the Journal of VLSI Signal and Image Processing published by the Kluwer Academic Publishers. He also served on the Editorial Board of IEEE Press. At present, he serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Multidimensional Systems and Signal Processing published by Springer. Most recently he coedited a 2-volume special issue of the IEEE Proceedings on Non-silicon non-von Neumann computing.

Dr. Basu has organized, chaired sessions, and has been a panelist in many conferences in the areas of computing, circuits and systems, statistical learning theory. He was the founding general chair and a steering committee member of the first IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME), which has since become a major international conference. He was a also co-organizer of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Statistical Learning and Applications at the Katholieke University, Leuven, Belgium.

He served as a council delegate representing the Engineering Section of the American Association of the advancement of Science (AAAS) from 2019 to 2022. The Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) recognized him with an award for Enhancing the Mission of SRC and NSF through Collaboration.