Vivek Shripad Borkar (born 19 September 1954) is an Indian electrical engineer, mathematician, and an Institute Chair Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. He is widely recognized for introducing a convex analytical paradigm based on occupation measures in stochastic optimal control processes, which significantly advanced the understanding of stochastic control and adaptive control schemes.
Education
Borkar earned his Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay in 1976, followed by an M.S. in Systems and Control Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in 1977. He completed his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980, under the supervision of Pravin Varaiya, with a thesis titled Identification and Adaptive Control of Markov Chains.
Academic Career
After a brief stint as a visiting scientist at the University of Twente (Netherlands), Borkar returned to India in 1981 to join the TIFR Centre for Applicable Mathematics in Bengaluru as a fellow. In 1989, he moved to the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) as an assistant professor, serving until 1999. He then joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) as a professor, eventually becoming a Distinguished Professor before his superannuation in 2011. He subsequently moved to his alma mater, IIT Bombay, where he holds a chair professorship at the School of Technology and Computer Science.
Research Contributions
Borkar's research spans stochastic control, learning control theory, stochastic processes, distributed computation, multi-timescale algorithms, approximation and learning algorithms, multi-agent problems, and small noise limits. He developed a protocol using a conditional version of importance sampling for estimating Markov chain averages, later confirmed by researchers at MIT. His work has been documented in over 370 peer-reviewed articles.
Selected Books
- Optimal Control of Diffusion Processes (1989)
- Probability Theory: An Advanced Course (1995)
- Stochastic Approximation: A Dynamical Systems Viewpoint (2008)
- Hamiltonian Cycle Problem and Markov Chains (2012, co-authored)
- Ergodic Control of Diffusion Processes (2012, co-authored)
Awards and Honors
- 1982 – IEEE CSS Best Transactions Paper Award
- 1992 – Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology (one of India's highest science awards)
- 1995 – Homi Bhabha Fellowship
- 2000 – IIT Bombay Distinguished Alumnus Award
- 2008 – P. C. Mahalanobis Medal (Indian National Science Academy)
- 2009 – TWAS Prize (The World Academy of Sciences)
- 2009 – IFIP Wireless Days Best Paper Award
Fellowships
Borkar is an elected fellow of all three major Indian science academies — the Indian Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, and the National Academy of Sciences, India. He is also a fellow of IEEE (Life Fellow), the Indian National Academy of Engineering, The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), and the American Mathematical Society.
