Biographies
In order of appearance?Wen-mei Hwu, University of Illinois
Wen-mei Hwu is the Walter J. ("Jerry") Sanders III-Advanced Micro Devices Endowed Chair in Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Coordinated Science Laboratory. His IMPACT Research Group is well known for development of the IMPACT Compiler and other novel computing technologies now widely used in industry and academic research. He is a leader of many parallel computing research and teaching initiatives at the University of Illinois, which are aligned through Parallel@Illinois. (www.Parallel.Illinois.edu). He is director of the world's first NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence, co-director of the Intel-Microsoft-funded Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC), and Co-PI for hardware of the NSF Petascale Computer Project, "Blue Waters" in collaboration with IBM. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM and author of 200+ peer-reviewed articles. He is co-author with David Kirk of Programming Massively Parallel Processors - A Hands-On Approach, published by Elsevier in January 2010.
John Stratton, University of Illinois
John Stratton is a graduate student and instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a teaching assistant for his adviser, Wen-mei Hwu, he has shared in the development and administration of college courses and workshops on CUDA since the first course offering in the spring of 2007. His graduate studies focus on data-parallel programming models and their implementations on multicore and GPU architectures.
John Stone, University of Illinois
John Stone is a Senior Research Programmer in the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and Associate Director of the NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence at the University of Illinois. Mr. Stone is the lead developer of VMD, a high performance molecular visualization tool used by researchers all over the world. His research interests include molecular visualization, GPU computing, parallel processing, ray tracing, haptics, and virtual environments.
Michael Garland, NVIDIA
Michael Garland is a research scientist at NVIDIA. Dr. Garland holds B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has published numerous articles in leading conferences and journals on a range of topics including surface simplification, remeshing, texture synthesis, novice-friendly modeling, free-form animation, scientific visualization, graph mining, and visualizing complex graphs. His current research interests include computer graphics and visualization, geometric algorithms, and parallel algorithms and programming models.
David Kirk, NVIDIA
David Kirk is a Fellow and former Chief Scientist of NVIDIA. He led the development of graphics technology for many popular consumer entertainment platforms and holds 50+ patents and patent applications relating to graphics design. David has published 50+ articles on graphics technology and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2006. In 2002, he was awarded the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award for his role in bringing high-performance computer graphics systems to the mass market. He is co-author with Wen-mei Hwu of Programming Massively Parallel Processors - A Hands-On Approach, published by Elsevier in January 2010.
Jonathan Cohen, NVIDIA
Jonathan Cohen is a Senior Research Scientist with NVIDIA, where he develops methods for using NVIDIA's massively parallel GPUs for scientific computing and real-time physical simulation. Prior to joining NVIDIA, he spent several years working in the Hollywood feature film visual effects industry, where he developed software for films including "The Cat in the Hat" and "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." At Sony Pictures Imageworks, he supervised development of the sand simulation and rendering system for "Spider-Man 3."
Mr. Cohen was awarded an Academy Award (Technical Achievement Award) in 2007 from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences for his work on fluid simulation and volumetric modeling for visual effects. He received an undergraduate degree from Brown in Mathematics and Computer Science.
Lorena Barba, Boston University
Lorena Barba obtained her PhD in Aeronautics from California Institute of Technology in 2004. She then joined the Department of Mathematics at the University of Bristol, UK. In the Fall of 2008, she has started a new position as Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering in Boston University. Dr Barba is a computational scientist and a fluid dynamicist. Her research covers particle methods used for fluid simulation, the development of fast and efficient algorithms, the use of novel computer architectures, as well as fundamental and applied aspects of fluid dynamics. [full bio]
Jeremy Meredith, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Jeremy Meredith is a computer scientist in the Future Technologies Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where his research interests include emerging computing architectures and large-scale visualization. He received his MS in Computer Science from Stanford University and his BS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Jeremy is a recipient of the 2008 ACM Gordon Bell Prize and a 2005 R&D100 Award.