Keynote Speakers & Panelists

Plenary Keynote Speakers

Dr. Deborah Agarwal

  • Scientific Data Division Director, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
  • Senior Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
  • Research Affiliate, Berkeley Institute for Data Science, University of California, Berkeley
Keynote: Lessons Learned in a Research Career in Computing, Data Science, and Management

Abstract:
Dr. Agarwal has spent the last 17 years applying computer and data science research to science challenges. This work has led to many insights into gaps in the available computing research. It has also led to many insights into how to engage scientists and have impact. This talk will discuss some of these challenges and insights as well as lessons learned along the way.

Bio

Dr. Deborah Agarwal is a Senior Scientist and Division Director for the Scientific Data Division, at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). The Scientific Data Division (SciData) transforms data-driven discovery and understanding through the development and application of novel data science methods, technologies, and infrastructures with scientific partners. Dr. Agarwal’s current research focuses on developing computational tools to enable scientists to organize and use Earth Science data to address challenges more effectively. She has worked on projects involving carbon flux, watershed understanding, tropical forests, soil carbon, carbon capture, cosmology, particle accelerators, data repositories, and satellite data. She is also active in efforts to broaden diversity in computing research and a member of the Computing Research Association Committee on Widening Participation.

Dr. Manish Gupta

  • Director, Google Research India
Keynote: Using Cloud and AI to Help Billions

Abstract:
We begin by describing the rapid strides made in artificial intelligence by the growing availability of computational power, and the democratization of these capabilities via Cloud. In particular, we describe the dramatic recent progress of generative AI models. We then describe several open challenges as we seek to advance AI in a manner that benefits billions of human beings who have been relatively untouched by technology, starting with people in India. We present our work on multilingual models to democratize information access in a diverse set of Indian languages, dealing with challenges like code mixing, non-unique transliterations, idiomatic misspellings and mispronunciation of English words influenced by the native language of the user. We describe a couple of problems in healthcare in the Global South where we lack data in digital form to begin with, but where AI can help. Finally, we describe our efforts to build foundational layers of an agricultural stack, based on analysis of satellite imagery, to help transform agriculture and the lives of farmers. Through these examples, we hope to convey the excitement of being an AI researcher at this time when there are fascinating open problems to tackle and an unprecedented opportunity to make a difference to the world.

Bio

Dr. Manish Gupta is the Director of Google Research India. He holds an additional appointment as Infosys Foundation Chair Professor at IIIT Bangalore. Previously, Manish has led VideoKen, a video technology startup, and the research centers for Xerox and IBM in India. As a Senior Manager at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, Manish led the team developing system software for the Blue Gene/L supercomputer. IBM was awarded a National Medal of Technology and Innovation for Blue Gene by US President Barack Obama in 2009. Manish holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He has co-authored about 75 papers, with more than 7,000 citations in Google Scholar (and an h-index of 46), and has been granted 19 US patents. While at IBM, Manish received two Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards, an Outstanding Innovation Award and the Lou Gerstner Team Award for Client Excellence. Manish is a Fellow of ACM and the Indian National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of a Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Delhi.

Prof. Ewa Deelman

  • Research Professor and Research Director, USC Information Sciences Institute
Keynote: Scientific Workflow Management, is Artificial Intelligence the Answer?

Abstract:
Scientific workflows are now a common tool used by domain scientists in a number of disciplines. They are appealing because they enable users to think at high level of abstraction, composing complex applications from individual application components. Workflow management systems (WMSs), such as Pegasus (https://pegasus.isi.edu/) automate the process of executing these workflows on modern cyberinfrastructure. They take these high-level, resource-independent descriptions and map them onto the available heterogeneous resources: campus clusters, high-performance computing resources, high-throughput resources, clouds, and the edge. WMSs can select the appropriate resources based on their architecture, availability of key software, performance, reliability, availability of cycles, storage space, among others. However, the world around us is changing and new AI technologies are growing at an incredible rate. The question is how can AI be used in the context of composing and managing scientific workflows? What are the potential benefits and drawbacks? This talk will describe the key concepts used in the Pegasus WMS to help automate the execution of workflows in distributed and heterogeneous environments. It will explore potential use of artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches to enhance automation. The talk will also help identify challenges that exist in adopting novel approaches for science at the technological and social levels.

Bio

Ewa Deelman received her PhD in Computer Science from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1998. Following a postdoc at the UCLA Computer Science Department she joined the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI) in 2000, where she is serving as a Research Director and is leading the Science Automation Technologies Center. She is also a Research Professor at the USC Computer Science Department and an AAAS, IEEE, and USC/ISI Fellow. The USC/ISI Science Automation Technologies Center explores the interplay between automation and the management of scientific workflows that include resource provisioning and data management. Dr. Deelman pioneered workflow planning for computations executing in distributed environments. Her group has led the design and development of the Pegasus Workflow Management software and conducts research in job scheduling and resource provisioning in distributed systems, workflow performance modeling, provenance capture, and the use of cloud platforms for science.  Dr. Deelman is also the Principal Investigator and Director of the NSF-funded Cyberinfrastructure Center of Excellence, CI Compass, that serves the NSF Major Facilities.

In 2006 Dr. Deelman founded the annual Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science (WORKS), which is held annually in conjunction with the SC conference. In 2015, Dr. Deelman received the HPDC Achievement Award for her contributions to the area of scientific workflows and in 2022 she received the Euro-Par Achievement Award for her outstanding contributions to parallel computing.

Dr. Eyal de Lara

  • Professor and Chair, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Keynote: System Software for Hierarchical Cloud Networks: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract:
Next generation applications such as augmented and virtual reality, autonomous driving, and Industry 4.0, have tight latency constraints and produce large amounts of data. To address the real-time nature and high bandwidth usage of these applications, hierarchical cloud computing provides an extension to the cloud infrastructure through a hierarchy of datacenters located between the edge devices and the cloud. This proximity to the location of data generation enables new systems that provide low latency and reduce network load.  Simultaneously, the network and the application workload outside of the wide-area cloud datacenter and closer to the edge, becomes more dynamic requiring system software to adapt more frequently.  In this talk, I will describe new challenges and opportunities for the design of system software for hierarchical cloud networks.  I will provide examples from my group’s recent efforts to create distributed systems to simplify the deployment of novel applications on a hierarchy of data centers that span from the edge of the network for the wide-area cloud.

Bio

Prof. Eyal De Lara was awarded his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University in 2002. Upon graduation, he joined the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science. In 2007, he was awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor. In 2015, he was promoted to the rank of Professor. He currently serves as the Chair of the department. Professor de Lara’s research lies in the areas of cloud and mobile computing where he has contributed novel algorithms for system virtualization, edge computing, application scaling, indoor localization, mobile security, and continuous mobile sensing. Professor de Lara’s research has had a significant impact in both academia and industry. His research on VM fork, a new cloud computing abstraction, was commercialized by GridCentric, a Toronto based start-up that was acquired by Google. Professor de Lara’s work has been recognized with the EuroSys Test of Time Award, the CACS/AIC Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Prize, an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Award, Faculty Awards from IBM and VMware, as well as 3 best paper awards and 2 best paper honorable mentions. Professor de Lara has served as the editor in chief of GetMobile, the flagship publication of ACM SIGMOBILE, and has co-chaired the technical program committees of several conferences including ACM MobiSys and ACM/IEEE SEC, which are respectively the top venues in mobile systems and edge computing. His contributions to the mobile research community have been recognized with the 2020 SIGMOBILE Distinguished Service Award. 

Diversity and Inclusion Panel Members

Prof. Hemangee K. Kapoor

  • Professor of CSE, Department of CSE, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati

Prof. Hemangee K. Kapoor is a Professor and Associate Dean at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati. Her current research interests include multiprocessor computer architecture, emerging memory technologies, power-aware computing, and accelerators for neural networks. Prof. Kapoor received the B.Eng. degree in computer engineering from the College of Engineering, Pune, India, in 1998, the M.Tech. degree in computer science and engineering from the IIT Bombay, India, in 2000, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science and engineering from London South Bank University, London, U.K., in 2004. She is a Senior Member of the ACM and IEEE. At ACM, she has been the Vice President of the ACM India Council (2020-2022) and presently serves as a member of the ACM Council for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI).

Prof. Meenakshi D’Souza

  • Professor, International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIITB) 

Meenakshi is a Professor at IIIT Bangalore. Her research interests are in Formal Methods, Model Based Development for embedded software, Automata Theory, Software Testing. She is also interested in gender diversity and accessibility issues in IT. Meenakshi teaches courses on Software Testing, Automata theory and Computability, Discrete Mathematics, Graph Theory and Design and Analysis of Algorithms in the institute. Meenakshi’s course on Software Testing has been offered on the NPTEL, Swayam platform since 2017 and more than 55,000 learners have enrolled for this course over the years. Meenakshi is a Council Member and the Secretary cum Treasurer of ACM India and the Chair of the Steering Committee of the ISEC Conference. Meenakshi did her Master’s in Mathematics from University of Madras, Chennai and her Ph. D. in Theoretical Computer Science from The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai.

Dr. Manohar Swaminathan

  • Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research India

Manohar Swaminathan (also known as Swami Manohar) joined MSR in Dec 2015. His primary research interest is in virtual and augmented reality technologies. Currently he is focused on applying these for empowering visually impaired persons. His other interest is in the use of IoT and cloud for large scale impact in emerging markets. Prior to joining MSR, Manohar’s career has spanned the worlds of research, academia, and entrepreneurship. He was a professor of Computer Science and Automation, IISc from 1990 to 2005, where his research interests were in computer graphics, virtual reality, CAD for rapid prototyping and internet technologies. He has published over forty refereed journal and conference publications and has supervised three PhD theses and over forty masters theses. Prior to IISc, he was a tenure track faculty at University of North Carolina, Charlotte for two years. He earned a BE in ECE at GCT, Coimbatore, a Masters in EE at IISc, and a PhD in computer science from Brown University, where his thesis focused on supercomputing with VLSI. Manohar was part of the team that invented the Simputer and was awarded the first Dewang Mehta Award for innovation in IT by the Government of India. He was also part of the team that pioneered faculty entrepreneurship in India and co-founded PicoPeta Simputers (acquired in 2005 by a publicly traded company) and Strand (formerly Strand Life Sciences), LimberLink Technologies and Escape Velocity Accelerator. He has been a TiE charter member, angel investor, and mentor to several startups.

Dr. Ilkay Altintas

  • Chief Data Scientist Officer, University of California, San Diego (UCSD), USA

Dr. İlkay Altıntaş, a research scientist at the University of California San Diego, is the Chief Data Science Officer of the San Diego Supercomputer Center as well as a Founding Fellow of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute. She is the Founding Director of the Workflows for Data Science (WorDS) Center of Excellence and the WIFIRE Lab. The WoRDS Center specializes in the development of methods, cyberinfrastructure, and workflows for computational data science and its translation to practical applications. The WIFIRE Lab is focused on artificial intelligence methods for an all-hazards knowledge cyberinfrastructure, becoming a management layer from the data collection to modeling efforts, and has achieved significant success in helping to manage wildfires. Since joining SDSC in 2001, she has been a principal investigator and a technical leader in a wide range of cross-disciplinary projects. With a specialty in scientific workflows, she leads collaborative teams to deliver impactful results through making computational data science work more reusable, programmable, scalable, and reproducible. Her work has been applied to many scientific and societal domains including bioinformatics, geoinformatics, high-energy physics, multi-scale biomedical science, smart cities, and smart manufacturing. She is also a popular MOOC instructor in the field of “big” data science and has reached more than a million learners across the globe. Among the awards she has received are the 2015 IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing for Early Career Researchers and the 2017 ACM SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing Award. Dr. Altıntaş received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. For a list of the more than 25 journal papers and 100 refereed scientific articles that Dr. Altıntaş has published, visit her Google Scholar page.

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