Vijay Kumari Sharma & Ritesh Kumar Tiwari Endowment
for the Outstanding MS Thesis Award

IIIT Hyderabad gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution of 50 lakhs from Mrs Vijay Kumari Sharma for the establishment of The Vijay Kumari Sharma & Ritesh Kumar Tiwari Endowment. It is our privilege to honour the memory of Ritesh Kumar and his passion for research, with the Outstanding MS Thesis Award.

Ritesh Kumar Tiwari joined IIIT as an MS student in 2004 under Prof. Kamalakar Karlapalem. His main area of research interest was in the domain of information security and particularly in attack resilient protocols, access control, security in workflow management systems and security architectures for semantic web. His research work was supported by Microsoft Research Ph.D fellowship. He also received the IEEE Best Student Paper Award in Services Computing in 2006-07 for his work on SLA Driven Process Security through Monitored E-contracts.

Late Ritesh Kumar Tiwari

Ritesh Kumar's Parents

Father Late Mr. Tiwari

Mother Mrs. Vijay Kumari Sharma

In December 2007, Ritesh was diagnosed with Leukemia. He underwent several rounds of chemotherapy at Apollo Hospitals over the course of the next two years. His guide Prof. Kamalakar Karlapalem whom he referred to as his academic father, the then director Prof Sangal and innumerable friends and staff of IIITH stood by him taking turns at the hospital and hostel as he worked through his condition. He lost his father in 2008. Being the only child of his aging parents, Ritesh took care of his mother even while undergoing treatment. Despite the advanced stage of the disease, Ritesh fought back very courageously and never gave up hope. Ritesh left no stone unturned in fighting back at the disease. He passed away on October 4, 2009 after a valiant battle.

Ritesh was an extremely cheerful person and very dedicated to research. All his friends dearly remember him to be a humble, good natured, and a warm person. Through his persistence, dedication and determination, Ritesh left an indelible mark on the lives of everyone around him.

The endowment will enable every year The Vijay Kumari Sharma & Ritesh Kumar Tiwari Outstanding MS Thesis Award which recognizes with a medal and a certificate, the outstanding MS thesis among all theses successfully defended during the academic year. A contribution in the name of the awardee will be made to support financially needy undergraduate student(s)at the institute.

Outstanding MS Thesis Award

2021 (June)

Yashasvi Pathak

The Outstanding MS Thesis Award 2021 (June) is awarded to Yashasvi Pathak for his research on Deep Learning Enabled Molecule Design under the guidance of Prof U. Deva Priyakumar.

2021 (Dec)

Karnik Ram

The Outstanding MS Thesis Award 2021 (Dec) is awarded to Karnik Ram for his research on RP-VIO: Robust Plane-based Visual-Inertial Odometry for Dynamic Environments under the guidance of Prof. K Madhava Krishna.
https://blogs.iiit.ac.in/ritesh-tiwari-award/

2022 (June)

Utkarsh Azad

The Outstanding MS Thesis Award 2022 (June) is awarded to Utkarsh Azad for his research on A Fine Grained Approach to Computational Problems on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Hardware under the guidance of Prof. Harjinder Singh.
https://blogs.iiit.ac.in/ritesh-tiwari-award/