Spotlight on YAAA 2023 Awardees

The Young Alumni Achiever Award (YAAA) is an award of recognition given to young alumni of IIT Madras who display exceptional accomplishments in their respective fields. It felicitates the achievements of young alumni who have shown promise and early success in their professional journeys, as well as encouraging awardees to achieve further excellence in their chosen careers, this recognition is designed to strengthen their relationship with their alma mater.

Prof. Vyas Sekar is currently the Tan Family Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, with a courtesy appointment in the Computer Science Department. He earned his bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, where he was awarded the President of India Gold Medal. Sekar received his Ph.D. from the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University in 2010.

A member of CyLab and co-director of its former Secure and Private Internet-of-Things (IoT) Initiative, Sekar is a world-leading expert on security and networking. His research focuses on data-driven networking and security, software-defined networking, network verification and testing, and more. His work has been recognised with best paper awards at ACM SIGCOMM, ACM CoNext, and ACM Multimedia. Prof. Sekar was awarded the Young Alumni Achiever Award in 2023 by IIT Madras for his exceptional work in his field.

Dr Nikhil Handigol graduated from IIT Madras in 2008 with a bachelor's degree in Computer science and went on to receive his PhD from Stanford University. His research at Stanford focuses on SDN/OpenFlow and the architecture of the future Internet. At Stanford, he did some groundbreaking work in networking technologies and in 2013, he co-founded Forward Networking, a Networking Security company with three of his colleagues. At Forward Networks, the team has created technology to make the world’s networks more agile, predictable, and secure. This breakthrough technology is called the ‘digital twin’ of the network.

According to him, the biggest business achievement for the company has been to use technological innovation to solve a major business problem. In the process, the company has been able to change the practice of building and operating large complex networks. In simple words, Dr. Handigol and his team want to automate away the human error factor that causes network outages and security vulnerabilities. Dr Handigolr was awarded the Young Alumni Achiever Award in 2023 by IIT Madras for his exceptional work in his field.