CHICAGO (TIP): American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin (ASEI) has recognized four engineering achievers and four service excellence and contributors to ASEI with Lifetime Achievement award going to Naveen Jain. Amit Kumar, Consul General India in Chicago, at ASEI’s 33rd Annual National Convention focusing on Global Engineering & Technologies (GET-2020), held virtually on Dec 5 and 6 presented the awards.

Kumar emphasized the importance of Indian American engineers and scientists pooling their talents to help India at the finale session anchored by ASEI Board Member Dr Thomas Abraham, Chair Awards Committee, according to a media release.

The ASEI awardees are:

ASEI Lifetime Achievement – Naveen Jain

ASEI Entrepreneur of The Year – Jyoti Bansal

ASEI Engineer of The Year (Mech/Solar) – Dr Yogi Goswami

ASEI Engineer of The Year (Industrial Operations and Product Management) – Deval Desai

ASEI Service Excellence Award – Rakesh Patel

Hari Bindal ASEI Founders Award – Vatsala Upadhyay

Leadership and Contribution to ASEI – Rakesh Guliani and Sunita Dublish

Dr Neeraj Bindal, son of ASEI Founder the Late Dr. Hari Bindal paid a moving tribute to his father as he presented the Founder’s award to Vatsala.

Lifetime Achievemen awardee Jain, a former Microsoft executive now based in Bellevue, WA, is the Founder & CEO of Viome, a wellness company. He is also the Founder and Executive Chairman of Moon Express, which is developing a robotic lunar lander to explore and mine the moon.

Jain’s first entrepreneurial venture was InfoSpace, which he founded in 1996, after leaving Microsoft. He rode the dot-com bubble’s rise through the next several years, becoming a billionaire in 2000 when stock prices hit their highest mark, with his personal wealth alone totaling around $2.2 billion.

The ASEI convention started with a welcome by the organization’s President Jwalant Lakhia.

In the first session emceed by Anu Gopalakrishnan, keynote speaker Deval Desai, VP Magna Int. spoke about Contributions of Indian Technologists weaving the storyline from mythology to history to modern era.

In the first technical session on Quantum computing by Dancing with Qubits, keynote speaker Dr Robert Sutor, VP Quantum, IBM Research, said Quantum promises to tackle classically challenging problems across a variety of industries. Prof. Solomon Darwin, known as the “Father of Smart Village Movement”, spoke about agricultural innovations that have the potential to make villages smarter with minimal resources.

In the session on User Experience Design (UXD), Urmila Kashyap, Senior User Experience Designer with VMware, talked about UX design systems for enterprise products based on her 10+ years of UXD experience working with large companies like Moody’s & VMware.

Surbhi Kaul, GM and Head of Product at Juniper Networks, sharing from her own experience of building and launching products over two decades at Netflix, Cisco, YouTube, Google and Juniper Networks discussed why UXD is critical to a product’s success.

In the session on Artificial Intelligence in the Enterprise, Jeff Hannah, Director, NA SBD Automotive and Akshay Desai, Associate Partner, McKinsey tried to separate fact from fiction about autonomous cars.

Desai focused on the future for autonomous vehicle adoption and the changing AV mobility market. Convention Co-Chair Bhavesh Joshi moderated the session. Nidhi Mathihali, Jyoti Rani and Isha Jagadish were declared the three top winners of the Youth Technology Exposition (YTE) conceived and coordinated by the Conference Content Chair and President of ASEI-Silicon Valley Piyush Malik.

In a keynote on Leadership in turbulent times, Dr. Satyam Priyadarshy, Chief Data Scientist & Technology Fellow, Haliburton, applied ancient Indian wisdom from Hanuman Chalisa to talk about a framework to face disruption in tumultuous times.

In the session on Career Management in a Disrupted Economy, Dilip Saraf, an IIT alumnus who has reinvented himself five times to be a Career and Life Coach, spoke about better career management by developing resilient options.

Piyush Malik, SVP SpringML, and Naveen Jain, CEO Viome & Founder/Chairman – Moon Express discussed Exponential Technologies for Humanity’s Grand Challenges.

Solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges lie at the intersection of these exponential technologies ranging from artificial intelligence (AI)to computing systems, robotics, and autonomous vehicles, they said.

In the session on Cybersecurity: Opportunity of Threat? Anand Oswal, SVP and GM at PaloAlto Networks, talked about the three concurrent mega transitions in enterprise IT that are impacting network security viz. Rise of a mobile workforce, Shift to hybrid cloud and Direct to app architectures.

He was joined in conversation with popular cybersecurity strategist and influencer Matthew Rosenquist who is currently the Chief Information Security Officer at Eclipz.

In the session on Innovation in the Enterprise, Manoj Prasad, VP & Global CTO, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Prakash Kota, CIO Autodesk discussed issues like how  this pandemic will change the pace of innovation in enterprise technology.

Speaking on Robotics and Space, Space scientist Dr Sreeja Nag who also happened to be a Robotist at Nuro, shared her experiences on autonomous robots that work on earth as well as in the space.