Biographies
Alex Szalay, The Johns Hopkins UniversityAlexander Szalay is the Alumni Centennial Professor of Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University. He is also Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He is a cosmologist, working on the statistical measures of the spatial distribution of galaxies and galaxy formation. He was born and educated in Hungary. He has written over 450 papers in various scientific journals, covering areas from theoretical cosmology to observational astronomy, spatial statistics and computer science. He is a Corresponding Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004 he received an Alexander Von Humboldt Award in Physical Sciences, in 2008 a Microsoft Award for Technical Computing. In 2008 he became Doctor Honoris Clausa of the Eotvos University, Budapest.
Rob Latham, Argonne National Laboratory
Robert Latham is a Senior Scientific Programmer at Argonne National Laboratory. After earning his BS (1999) and MS (2000) in Computer Engineering at Lehigh University (Bethlehem, PA), he worked at Paralogic, Inc., a Linux cluster start-up. His work with cluster software including MPI implementations and parallel file systems eventually led him to Argonne, where he has spent the last 8 years. His research focus has been on high performance IO for scientific applications and IO metrics. He has worked on the ROMIO MPI-IO implementation, the parallel file systems PVFS (v1 and v2), and Parallel NetCDF.
Justin Miller, Indiana University
Justin Miller is a systems administrator for the Data Capacitor project at Indiana University. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from Purdue University and is currently working on a Masters of Information Science from Indiana University.
Eric Wernert, Indiana University
Eric Wernert is Senior Manager for Visualization Technologies and Futures at Indiana University. He also holds the role of Senior Scientist within the UITS Advanced Visualization Lab at IU. Wernert holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University where his dissertation focused on effective navigation techniques within virtual reality environments. Wernert has over 15 years of experience in applying advanced visualization technologies across the breadth and depth of the Indiana University system and mission, with applications touching on research, creative activities, education, and community outreach.
Geoffrey Charles Fox, Indiana University (8122194643, gcf@indiana.edu, http://www.infomall.org/)
Fox received a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Cambridge University and is now professor of Informatics and Computing, and Physics at Indiana University where he is director of the Digital Science Center and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies at the School of Informatics and Computing. He previously held positions at Caltech, Syracuse University and Florida State University. He has supervised the PhD of 61 students and published over 600 papers in physics and computer science. He currently works in applying computer science to Bioinformatics, Defense, Earthquake and Ice-sheet Science, Particle Physics and Chemical Informatics. He is principal investigator of FutureGrid, a new facility to enable development of new approaches to computing. He is involved in several projects to enhance the capabilities of Minority Serving Institutions.
Craig Stewart, Indiana University
Craig Stewart leads the Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI), IU's main research, development, and delivery organization in advanced IT research. In tandem, Stewart leads the Research Technologies (RT) division of University Information Technology Services (UITS), which serves the research and scholarship missions of Indiana University. Stewart has had a long career in IT at Indiana University, with extensive experience in leading and managing services to support researchers at IU, including past appointments as Director of the Center for Statistical and Mathematical Computing, Research and Academic Computing, Indiana Genomics Initiative Information Technology Core; and Special Assistant for the Life Sciences, IU Office of the Vice President for Research. Stewart is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Informatics, and also holds adjunct appointments in the Department of Medical Genetics (IU School of Medicine) and Biology (IU Bloomington). Stewart has served as a Visiting Faculty Member in Computer Science, University of Stuttgart, and as a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the Technische Universitaet Dresden (Germany). He has a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Indiana University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics and Biology from Wittenburg University. [full bio]
Stephen Wu, Indiana University
Tak-Lon Wu, also named as Stephen, has a M.S. and is currently working on a PHD of Computer Science in Indiana University at Bloomington. He is a member of SalsaHPC group in Community Grids Lab of Pervasive Technology Institute.
Thilina Gunarathne, Indiana University and IBM
Thilina Gunarathne is a Computer Science PHD student in Indiana University at Bloomington. He is a member of SalsaHPC group in Community Grids Lab of Pervasive Technology Institute. His research interests lies in the areas of parallel programming and cloud computing. He is a Apache Committer and a PMC member of Apache Axis2 and Apache Web Services projects.
Judy Qiu, Indiana University
Judy Qiu is an assistant director of Pervasive Technology Institute and an assistant professor of School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. She leads SALSAHPC group (salsahpc.indiana.edu) and current focus is data intensive computing at the intersection of cloud and multicore technologies. Her research interests involve the architecture and use of leading-edge technologies such as MapReduce with special emphasis on their value to important data intensive applications such as those from the life sciences. She graduated from Syracuse University with an outstanding graduate student award and completed her PhD in Computer Science. She is committed to education and diversity, including projects focusing on undergraduate research and involving students from under-represented communities. She is also active in service to the technical community, which include serving as a Program Chair of the 2nd IEEE International Conference of Cloud Computing Technology and Science 2010 and on editorial board of International Journal of Cloud Computing.
Jaliya Ekanayake, Microsoft Research
Jaliya Ekanayake is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Informatics and Computing of Indiana University, Bloomington. His research advisor is Prof. Geoffrey Fox. In his Ph.D. research, Jaliya focuses on architecture and performance of runtime environments for data intensive scalable computing. His research has lead to the development of the Twister runtime for iterative MapReduce computations as well. Currently he works for the Extreme Computing Group at Microsoft Research and works on runtimes and applications for Windows Azure.
Christophe Poulain, Microsoft Research
Christophe Poulain is a senior research SDE in the Advanced Research Tools and Services group of the External Research division of Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA. One of his current interests is the development and the application of software to solve problems that involve massive amounts of data and computation, particularly in the scientific domain. [full bio]
Mahidhar Tatineni, San Diego Supercomputer Center
Mahidhar Tatineni received his M.S. & Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from UCLA. He currently leads the user services group at SDSC.
Johan Bollen, Indiana University
Johan Bollen is associate professor at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. He was formerly a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 2005-2009, and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of Old Dominion University from 2002 to 2005. He obtained his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Brussels in 2001 on the subject of cognitive models of human hypertext navigation. He has taught courses on Data Mining, Information Retrieval and Digital Libraries. His research has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Science Foundation, Library of Congress, National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. His present research interests are complex networks, usage data mining, computational sociometrics, informetrics, and digital libraries. He has extensively published on these subjects as well as adaptive information systems. He is presently the Principal Investigator of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation- and NSF-funded MESUR project which studies scientific communication from large-scale usage data.
David Wild, Indiana University
David Wild is an Assistant Professor of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University School of Informatics. He directs the Cheminformatics Program, and leads a research group of approximately 15 students focused on large scale data mining and aggregation of chemical and biological information. He has developed a teaching program in cheminformatics at the University, including an innovative distance education program, most recently resulting in an online repository of cheminformatics teaching materials at http://icep.wikispaces.com/. He has been PI or CoPI on over $1.4m of funding, and has over 30 scholarly publications. He is Editor-in-Chief (along with Chris Steinbeck at the EBI) of the Journal of Cheminformatics, and works as editorial advisor or reviewer to many journals. He is also involved in several cheminformatics organizations including being a trustee of the Chemical Structure Association Trust and a member of the American Chemical Society. He has helped organize many conferences and symposia in this field, and have recently acted as an expert witness in cheminformatics. He is also the director of Wild Ideas Consulting, a small scientific computing company specializing in informatics and cheminformatics.
Sun Kim, Indiana University
Sun Kim is a Chair of Faculty Division C, Founding Director of Center for Bioinformatics Research, an Associate Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing Bloomington, an Associated Faculty at Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics, an Adjunct Associate Professor of Celluar and Integrative Physiology, Medical Sciences Program, an Affiliated Faculty at the biocomplexity institute at Indiana University (IU) - Bloomington. Prior to IU, he worked at DuPont Central Research and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Sun Kim received B.S and M.S and Ph.D in Computer Science from Seoul National University, KAIST, and the University of Iowa, respectively. Sun Kim is a recipient of Outstanding Junior Faculty Award at Indiana University 2004, and US NSF CAREER Award 2003. His research areas are machine learning and algorithms and their applications to microbial genome analysis and cancer epigenomics. His group is also developing a novel bioinformatics system architecture using the cloud computing and graphical workflow composers. He is actively contributing to the bioinformatics community, serving as Vice Chair for education at IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Bioinformatics, serving on the editorial board for journals including co-editor-in-chief for International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics, and co-organizing many scientific meetings including IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM) 2008 as a co-program chair and 2009 as a co-conference chair.
Robert Grossman, University of Illinois at Chicago (http://users.lac.uic.edu/~grossman/)
Robert Grossman is the Director of the Laboratory for Advanced Computing (LAC) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The Laboratory for Advanced Computing develops open source technology for internet-scale and cloud computing, such as the high performance network transport protocol UDT and the cloud computing system Sector. He is also an Associate Senior Fellow at the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology (IGSB) at the University of Chicago.
He is the Managing Partner of Open Data Group, which provides outsourced analytic services, and is active in the development of computing standards. He is the Chair of the Data Mining Group, which develops the Predictive Model Markup Language, and the Chair of the Open Cloud Consortium, which develops interoperability frameworks for cloud computing.
Yunhong Gu, University of Illinois at Chicago
Yunhong Gu is a research scientist at the National Center for Data Mining of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). His research work includes high performance data transport protocols, distributed file systems, and parallel computing. He is the lead developer of open source software UDT and Sector/Sphere. Dr. Gu obtained his PhD degree in Computer Science from UIC in 2005.
Renato Figueiredo, University of Florida
Renato J. Figueiredo is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Florida (UF), and UF site director of the NSF I/UCRC Center for Autonomic Computing. Dr. Figueiredo received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Universidade de Campinas in 1994 and 1995, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University in 2001. From 2001 until 2002 he was on the faculty of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Northwestern University at Evanston, Illinois. His research interests are in the areas of virtualization, distributed systems, overlay networks, computer architecture, and operating systems.
Tamas Budavari, The Johns Hopkins University
Tamas Budavari is a research scientist at The Johns Hopkins University, where he focuses on computational and statistical challenges in astronomy.