Sir Robin Saxby, chairman, ARM Technologies, UK, and a recipient of the Faraday Medal in 2002, will formally present the medal to Premji in the upcoming International Conference on Embedded Systems and Software being organised by the IEE at, Bangalore from November 10-12, 2005.

"Mr. Azim Premji is today one of the leading industrialists from India who is renowned the world over for his contribution towards technological advances. We are delighted to confer on him the Faraday Medal and have his name associated with the Institution," said. Paul Jackson, director of professional operations, IEE.

The Faraday Medal is a bronze medal established in 1922 to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the first Ordinary Meeting of the Society of Telegraph Engineers (now the IEE). It is awarded once a year, either for notable scientific or industrial achievement in electrical engineering or for conspicuous service rendered to the advancement of electrical science, without restriction as regards nationality, country of residence or membership of the IEE.

Previous recipients of the Faraday Medal include Oliver Heaviside, the first person to receive the medal in 1922; S.Z. de Ferranti, Engineer and Entrepreneur in 1924; Professor C K Kao, the "father" of fibre optic communications in 1989; and Professor P M Grant in recognition of his outstanding work on signal processing in 2004.

The Faraday Medal to Premji will be formally presented at the two-day international conference on "Embedded Systems & Software" at Bangalore from November 11-12, 2005, being organised by IEE. The conference is part of IEE''s endeavour to provide an effective forum for discussion and exchange of ideas with leading authorities in this area from the industrial, academic and user segments. The Conference will have presentations and discussion on various topics by well-known speakers of national and international level.
The registration form for the conference can be downloaded from the IEE website at http://www.iee.org/Events/EmbeddedSystems&Software2005.cfm
Presentations include:

• ''The future of embedded systems'' by Dr AL Rao, COO, Wipro Technologies
  
• ''Start up to global standard and beyond'' by Sir Robin Saxby, chairman of ARM, UK
  
• ''Future Directions in mobile computing'', by Siva Ramamurthy, director, communication products, Intel
  
• ''System level design with FPGA embedded processors'' by Reno Sanchez, director of the Microprocessor IP Centre of Excellence, Xilinx
  
• ''Technology alliances in the global embedded systems market'' by Dr Sunil Sherlekar, principal consultant (R&D), Tata Consultancy Services
  
• ''Addressing verification challenges in embedded systems'' by Moshe Gavrielov, executive VP and general manager, verification division, Cadence, USA
  
• Panel Session on ''Developing low cost computing for the Indian market''

Chair, Professor S Sadagopan, Director, IIIT Bangalore; Dr Swami Manohar, CEO, PicoPeta; and Kentaro Toyama, assistant managing director, Microsoft Research India