Telenor's Research Award 2005 to Professor Ramjee Prasad

Each year Telenor selects a theme for the award in agreement with the international award committee. The subject for 2005 is "Enabling technologies and communication based value added services for the home, leisure and professional environments". Personalised services and universal access adapted to available terminals is a vision for the future development of the telecom industry.

The award committee unanimously chose Professor Prasad as the winner. "Professor Prasad is a world-class researcher with a long history of merits, both academic and organisational. His record with respect to lectures given, courses, tutorials and papers is impressive. He is the author or co-author of 16 books, and has a list of more than 500 publications. And he has been an active creator of academic and industrial networks internationally," says Berit Svendsen, Head of Telenor Nordic Fixed and Head of the award committee.

For the theme of this year, Prasad has been an early leader in formulating a vision around Personal Area Networks. This is judged to be a key concept for flexible access to multi-media and personalised services through available network ressources and available terminals. His work has had significant impact on technology development, constituency building and concept formation, and future impact on applications is expected. He is a leader in an important but still formative field - mobile communications beyond UMTS (3G).

Besides his own work Professor Prasad has also made a great effort to promote research in Aalborg, for example by organizing international programs involving both universities and industries.

Professor Prasad was born in India in 1946 and has worked in various domains of tele-communi-cations in India, Tanzania, the Netherlands and Denmark. He has been with the University of Aalborg since 1999, where he is currently the Director of Center for TeleInFrastructure (CTIF).

This is the ninth Telenor's Nordic research award. Previous winners have been Dr. Gisle Bjøntegaard, Telenor (1997); Professor Stephen Pink, University of Luleå (1998); The Telepathology Group in Tromsø (1999); Professor Peter Andrekson, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg (2000); Professor Jon Bing, University of Oslo (2001); Professor Christian Jensen, University of Aalborg (2002); Dr Haakon Bryhni, Birdstep Technology ASA (2003), and Professor Claes Wohlin at Blekinge Institute of Technology (2004).

More information: see Telenor Research and Innovation Award