Information and Computational Science
Faculty Biographies and Research Interests |
Elisa Bertino She joined Purdue University in 2004. Previously, she was a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Communication of the University of Milan, where she was the Department Head from 2000 to 2003. She has also been a visiting researcher at the IBM Research Laboratory (now Almaden) in San Jose, at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, at Telcordia Technologies.
Her research interests include security, privacy, digital identity management systems, database systems, distributed systems, multimedia systems. In those areas, Elisa has published more than 400 papers in major refereed journals, and in proceedings of international conferences and symposia. She is a co-author of several books, including the forthcoming book “Security for Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures” Springer (to appear in Spring 2008). She has been the coordinating co-editor in chief of the Very Large Database Systems (VLDB) Journal from 2002 to 2007. She also serves as editorial board member of several ACM and IEEE international scientific journals. She served for four years as a member of the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board. Her research has been sponsored by several organizations and companies, including the US National Science Foundation, the US Air Force Office for Sponsored Research, the I3P Consortium, the European Union (under the 5th and 6th IST research programmes), IBM, Microsoft, the Italian Telecom. Elisa is a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of ACM. She received the 2002 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award for “For outstanding contributions to database systems and database security and advanced data management systems” and the 2005 IEEEComputer Society Tsutomu Kanai Award “For pioneering and innovative research contributions to secure distributed systems”.
|
Maarten de Hoop Maarten is the founder and director of the Geo- Mathematical Imaging Group (GMIG). He has been a part-time visiting professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT since 2001.
Focus areas of application include materials science and nanotechnology (with ties to NCN), mechanical engineering (geometric control), life sciences (quantitative physiology, emerging infectious diseases) and earth sciences (energy, CO_2 sequestration), and fluid dynamics. He also directs GMIG, a corporate and federally funded unique, multi-disciplinary (including PHYS, EAS and STAT), graduate research program that strives to meet the complex challenges of modern day prospect evaluation, enhanced oil recovery, and general geological study of Earth's subsurface by expanding the boundaries of knowledge of (seismic and diffuse electromagnetic) imaging, inverse scattering and tomography through collaborative scientific activities and breakthroughs. These activities include the integration with rock and mineral physics and geophysical fluid dynamics.
Building on the combined expertise of our research group, the general interest of GMIG is the development of new geophysical probes, accounting for realistic physics and geology, to map and characterize multiscale structures and variations in rock properties, and to interpret them in the context of the relevant geological and fluid flow processes on different spatial and temporal scales. A joint approach to reflection seismology and global seismology is being followed, the structural target being from local, near surface to planetary scale.
|
Noah received his B.S. and M.S. in Earth Systems from Stanford University and his Ph.D. in Earth Sciences from UC-Santa Cruz. His work on the dynamics and impact of climate change has been featured widely in the national and international media, including CBS News, NBC News, CNN News, Voice of America, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Business Week, The Observer, New Scientist, The Melbourne Herald-Sun, Le Monde, Repubblica and Der Spiegel. In 2006, Noah received the James R. Holton Award from the American Geophysical Union, recognizing outstanding research contributions by a junior atmospheric scientist.
|
Alex Pothen |
 These figures show some of the scientific projects enabled by the computational tools
for parallelization, load balancing, and automatic differentiation
being developed at the CSCAPES Institute.
Figure captions, clockwise from top left:1. The design of superconducting cavities for next generation accelerators in the COMPASS project involving the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and partners, which is part of the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program of the Department of Energy. 2. Sensitivity to salinity in the MIT Global Climate Model. 3. The proposed international ITER project to demonstrate fusion energy generation, which requires modeling magnetohydrodynamics. 4. The IBM Blue Gene supercomputer, projected to attain Petaflops/sec performance on which SciDAC problems will be solved. 5. The carboxysome organelles in a cyanobacterium that converts inorganic carbon to sugar, which are modeled as particles in this simulation at Sandia and Oak Ridge National Labs. |
Alex's research interests include computational science and engineering, high performance computing, and bioinformatics. He works on the creation of algorithms and software on high-end supercomputers to enable computational simulations in science and engineering. In his Department of Energy sponsored research at the Combinatorial Simulations and Petascale Simulations (CSCAPES) Institute, he leads work on multiple software tools: decomposing a computation into tasks and mapping them onto the processors of a supercomputer; computing derivatives of multivariate functions by transforming a program for computing the function into a program for computing the derivatives, both efficiently and accurately, using a novel technology called automatic differentiation; and parallel codes for solving large-scale combinatorial and algebraic problems on supercomputers. Researchers at the CSCAPES Institute disseminate their computational tools through collaborations: with physicists designing the next generation of particle accelerators, e.g., the International Linear Collider; systems biologists studying hydrogen-producing algae; chemical engineers modeling adsorption processes for scrubbing greenhouse gases from industrial emissions; electrical engineers modeling ultra-scale electronic circuits and devices, etc.
At the Computing Research Institute (CRI), Alex plans to work with faculty colleagues crossing disciplinary boundaries to promote high-end computational modeling in scientific and engineering problems critical to society. The computational landscape is currently in flux with the adoption of multicore microprocessors by the computing hardware industry, necessitating research in architecture, programming models, algorithms and performance engineering. At the same time, NSF and other federal agencies have a blueprint for computing that is driven by large-scale science and engineering. Alex's vision for CRI, shared with other faculty at Purdue, is to create theneeded computational expertise to enable multidisciplinary teams of scientists and engineers to build cutting-edge simulations on high-performance supercomputers; and to develop the computational infrastructure needed for high end computing on campus.
|
Ahmed H. Sameh He was the Head of the Departments of Computer Science at Purdue (1997 -2002) and the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, (1991-6). He is the founding Director of CRI at Purdue (2001-03) and was the William Norris Chair in Large-Scale Computing during his tenure at Minnesota. His research interests are focused on computational science and engineering with emphasis on numerical linear algebra, the design and performance analysis of parallel numerical algorithms.
Ahmed received his B.Sc. from the University of Alexandria, Egypt in 1961, M.S. from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1964, and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois (U-C) in 1968, all in Civil Engineering (Structural Mechanics). He was a faculty member of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois (U-C) from 1968 to 1991. He is a member of SIAM, and a fellow of ACM, IEEE, and AAAS. He received the IEEE’s 1999 Harry Goode Award for seminal and influential work in parallel numerical algorithms.
|
Wojciech Szpankowski In 1992 he was Professeur Invite at INRIARocquencourt, France, in 1999 he was Visiting Professor at Stanford University, and in 2006 the Erskine Fellow at University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.
Wojciech has been a guest editor and an editor of technical journals, including Theoretical Computer Science, ACM Transaction on Algorithms, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Foundation and Trends in Communications and Information Theory, and Combinatorics, Probability, and Computing. In June 2004, he directed the MSRI Graduate Program on the “Analysis of Algorithms and Information Theory”. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.
Wojciech's research
By combining analytic algorithmics and information theory, Wojciech has initiated a novel program, called analytic information theory, which applies analytic tools to the foundation of information theory. In 2000 Wojciech started a graduate seminar "Curious Minds'' and last year he initiated the Prestige Lecture Series on Science of Information. Currently, Wojciech is working towards establishing an institute whose goal is to advance a comprehensive science of information, offering a wealth of societal benefits in diverse engineering, scientific, and social disciplines, aiming at integrating research and teaching activities to investigate information from various angles -- from the fundamental theoretical underpinnings of information to the science and engineering of novel substrates, biological networks, communication and social networks, economics, and physical systems.
|
Ananth Grama He received his B. Engg. in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology (1989), his M.S. in Computer Engineering from the Wayne State University (1990), and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota (1996).
He joined the faculty at Purdue in 1996. He is a recipient of the Outstanding Dissertation Award at the University of Minnesota (1994), the National Science Foundation CAREER award (1998), Purdue University School of Science Outstanding Assistant Professor Award (1998), Purdue University School of Science Outstanding Teacher Award – elected by the students (2002), and the University Faculty Scholar Award (2002). Ananth’s areas of research are parallel and distributed computing, and scientific computing. On these topics, he has (co)authored a large number of papers and one of the most frequently cited texts “Introduction to Parallel Computing (1, 2 Ed., Chinese Ed.)”. Software from his group is incorporated into frequently accessed scientific sources such as the Biology Workbench (UIUC/UCSD), the Alliance for Cell Signaling (AfCS/UCSD) Molecule Pages, and into Sandia’s flagship molecular dynamics code, LAMMPS. Ananth serves on the editorial boards of Parallel Computing and PLoS ONE.
|
Research carried out by Elisa and her group currently addresses challenging problems related to digital identity management and protection from identity theft, high-assurance database security, assured information sharing, data privacy and pr1ivacy policies, security for grid computing systems. As part of her broader research agenda, she serves as the Research Director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) at Purdue University. 
CERIAS is one of the world's leading centers devoted to education and research on protection of critical computing and communication infrastructure. CERIAS is unique among such national centers in its multidisciplinary approach to the problems, ranging from purely technical issues (e.g., intrusion detection, network security, etc) to ethical, legal, educational, linguistic, and economic issues, and the subtle interactions and dependencies among them. The researchers affiliated with CERIAS include more than 80 faculty from six different colleges and 20+ departments across campus. CERIAS has "produced'' about 40% of the PhDs in information security since 1998. 
Maarten received his B.S. in Physics with Mathematics and Astronomy and an M.S. in Theoretical Physics from Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. in Technical Sciences from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. He came to Purdue from the Colorado School of Mines, where he was Co-Leader of the Center for Wave Phenomena in the Department of Mathematical and Computer Sciences. Prior to his position in Colorado, he was a Senior Research Scientist and Program Leader at Schlumberger Cambridge Research in England. He was also a Research Geophysicist for Shell Research. Maarten was the recipient of the 1996 J. Clarence Karcher Award from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists. He was also the recipient of the award for young scientists in 1991 from the International Society for Analysis, its Applications and Computation. He is an IOP (Institute of Physics) Fellow since 2001. He is currently the program leader (chair) of the Program on Random Media at SAMSI (Research Triangle Park), and is co-organizing a program on Inverse Problems at MSRI (Berkeley) in the Fall 2010. 
Maarten's research program focuses on inverse problems, microlocal analysis, imaging and computation. The research encompasses proving uniqueness and stability, developing computational microlocal and harmonic analysis, algorithms, and high performance computing (with ties to CRI) for realworld applications such as imaging the post-perovskite phase transformation near Earth's core-mantle boundary. Maarten directs the CCAM, which promotes both fundamental research - blurring the boundaries between applied and pure mathematics - and scientific and engineering applications. 
Noah and his research group are at the forefront of high-resolution climate modeling. In producing the most detailed projections of future climate change for both the United States and South Asia, they have drawn widespread attention to the critical role that fine-scale processes are likely to play in shaping future climate change. Related projects are focused on Europe, West Africa, Southern Africa, Central America, and South America. Noah is also working with an international team of collaborators to quantify how these projected climate changes will impact human health, water and energy supply and demand, agricultural production, terrestrial and marine ecology, and severe and hazardous weather. Like his group’s climate change projections, these impact assessments are breaking new ground in their scope and detail. A third emphasis of the research group, which Noah has termed “socioclimatic analysis,” has emerged in the past year and seeks to integrate detailed climate dynamics research with economics, policy, and human decision-making. 
Samuel D. Conte Professor of Computer Science
Ahmed's research activities focus on the design of parallel numerical linear algebra algorithms. These algorithms control the performance of numerous computational science and engineering applications such as model reduction of dynamical systems, oil reservoir simulation, design of nanodevices, and fluid-structure interaction (blood flow in arteries). These activities are funded through federal agencies, and the Intel Corporation. Multicore and petascale architectures are the main computing platforms used in Ahmed's research. Solvers developed in his group have been designed to overcome the challenges posed by these two types of architectures and have succeeded in realizing high performance. These parallel solvers have not only been used to speed up numerical simulations in the above applications, but have also been used in the design of adaptive libraries that assure performance portability across different architectures.
Professor, Department of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering
interests cover analysis and design of algorithms and data structures, analytic combinatorics, information theory, bioinformatics, stability of distributed systems, and modeling of computer networks. A common thread in his research is the combined application of probabilistic, analytic, and combinatorial methods to solve fundamental problems of practical and theoretical importance. Wojciech and his group have made fundamental and lasting contributions to stability, analysis of algorithms, information theory and bioinformatics. In stability, he devised in the 90's, radical methods for finding stability regions; in analysis of algorithms Wojciech's research group developed an analyticprobabilistic methodology dedicated to the precise quantification of algorithms' performance; in information theory together with his collaborators Wojciech solved some long standing open problems (e.g.,Wyner-Ziv conjecture, Ziv's conjecture, Gutman- Steinberg's conjecture, Huffman's code redundancy, entropy in hidden Markov processes, capacity of noisy constrained channel); in bioinformatics, working with domain experts, Wojciech's group has focused on the development of computational tools and statistical models for comparatively analyzing molecular interaction networks.
Professor, Department of Computer Science
Ananth's research focuses on models, abstractions, algorithms, and software for scientific computing applications. The central theme of his research agenda is that modeling and abstraction are often critical bottlenecks in the computational process -- requiring close interaction with, and a clear understanding of the application domain. To this end, Ananth's group works closely with applications scientists on a number of federally funded projects (Bill Goddard, Materials Modeling, CalTech, Shankar Subramaniam, Systems Biology, UCSD/Scripps, Priya Vashishtha, Physics, USC, Mete Sozen, Civil Engineering, Purdue, Narayan Aluru, Electromechanical Systems, UIUC). Ananth's group strongly believes in the broader impact of tools that can be directly used by applications scientists. This is exemplified in his work on reactive molecular dynamics (with Goddard et al.) which is being incorporated into LAMMPS and his work on analysis of biochemical pathways (with Subramaniam et al.), which is integrated into commonly accessed biology portals such as the Biology Workbench and the Alliance for Cell Signaling (AfCS) Molecule Pages -- literally reaching over 100,000 researchers and educators/ students. 
0s, 0ms