Chair, UTSA Computer Science Department; NSF Program Director; ACM Distinguished Scientist; about 150 publica- tions, $10M in external funding, with over $1M active NSF and Intel projects; Twice-elected chair of IEEE-CS Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (TCPP); Coordinator of NSF-supported TCPP Curriculum Initiative on Parallel and Distributed Computing; Helped create and establish GSU’s Computer Science Department and the PhD program.

Professional Leadership

Lead Program Director, National Science Foundation (Feb 2015 - June 2019): In my NSF position, I led the Learning and Workforce Development crosscutting programs at NSFs Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) in coalescing its emerging research and education programs such as CAREER, CRII, REU sites, and NRT around use-inspired, multidisciplinary, and translational research and education agenda in advanced computing, data and cybersecurity. I was also OAC’s liaison to several other crosscutting programs such as CISE EXPEDITIONS program, Smart and Connected Communities (SCC), NSF INCLUDES, and Cyberlearning. I helped develop new programs based on multidisciplinary community needs and national priorities such as the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) and Smart Cities initiative. With renewed focus, and significant outreach and dissemination efforts, we have had twice as many proposals in 2015-16 and three times in 2016-17 for the OAC CAREER research program, which is NSFs most prestigious award for early-career faculty. Working with and mentoring our CAREER and CRII (pre-CAREER) awardees has been a key highlight of my tenure at NSF. I have led the formulation of a new CyberTraining crosscutting program, in collaboration with most of the NSF directorates (including ENG, MPS, GEO, EHR, CISE, and SBE), to nurture and grow the nations scientific research workforce enabled by large-scale computational and data infrastructures and methods. Most recently, adding to the infrastructure-heavy focus of OAC, I have successfully created the OAC core research solicitation to enable advancements in translational cyberinfrastructure research. This is expected to transform OAC.

Professional societies: ACM Distinguished Scientist; Elected Chair of IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (TCPP) (2007-2011); External Reviewer for CS2013 ACM/IEEE Joint Task Force on CS Curriculum, Oct 2011.

Review boards: IEEE-CS Conference Advisory Committee, Technology and Conferences Board (2011,12), NSF Panel: BigData, RISES, CSR, CPS, CPATH, etc.

ACM/IEEE conference committee chair: General Co-Chair: IEEE BigData 2017; Steering Committee: EURO-EduPar-2015-19, EduPar-2017-19; Program Chair/Vice Chair: IC3-13-19, ICE-14, CSE-12,14, ICCC-12, HiPC-10, ICISTM-09, 10; SOBDAT-07; Panel/BoF Coordinator: SC-17, EduPDHC-13/SC-13, SC-12, HiPC-12,-10, EduPar-11,12,14; Workshop Chair: IEEE EduPar 2011-19, EURO-EduPar-2015-19, ACM EduHPC-2013-18, EduHiPC-2018, IPDPS PhD Forum 2009, ICPADS-09; Proceedings Chair: HiPC 2003-2013.

Scientific Leadership

Data intensive GeoSpatial computation: We have produced parallel GIS systems for overlay computation over polygonal data using Azure cloud API (first such work) [18,20], MPI [19], Hadoop [17], and CUDA [15] and have parallelized R-tree construction and searching over GPUs [16, 2]. This has resulted in a practical system for GIS scientists, about 40-50-fold end-to-end speedup on small clusters, and another GPU-based system for Spatial Join primitive with 40-fold speedup compared state-of-art systems. I gave a keynote on this at ACM BigSpatial-13 workshop [20] and another keynote recently at the combined audience of CLOUD/ICWS/SCC/BigData/MS/SERVICES 2016 conferences and several invited talks. I served as the general co-chair of 6th IEEE International Congress on Big Data, 2017, and presented a Visionary Track paper on parallel processing of spatial datasets from Geo, Bio, Climate and Social Science communities. Most recently, I moderated a research panel on the common big data challenges for these diverse communities at ACM Supercomputing conference (SC17) in Colorado.

Parallel data structures and parallel discrete event simulation: My ACM Distinguished Scientist ranking is primarily due to my most significant body of work leading to key advances in parallel data structures and discrete event simulation is the first theoretically scalable and currently the best practical event queue data structure for sharedmemory architectures, namely the “Parallel Heaps” on PRAMs [27, 28, 35], bus-based parallel machines [16], and recently on multi-cores and GPUs [4, Utility Patent 8 - 2015]. This is accompanied by several efficient sharedmemory algorithms for optimistic and conservative simulation [26, 32, 33] which have resulted in parallel software systems with effective speedups for hard-to-parallelize simulations, such as those for VLSI logic circuits [7]. My optimistic simulation algorithms have been refined to a stage now that the long outstanding problems of frequent rollbacks and/or of unbounded amount of storage for check-pointing that have plagued all previous algorithms last decade have been drastically reduced to almost no rollbacks and just one checkpoint per entity [6,8,9,15,16,17,20]. This body of work has been followed up by several groups nationally and internationally.
This is complemented with key enhancements to several additional parallel data structures including queues for grid scheduling [35], parallel calendar queues [10], concurrent skew heaps [12], distributed task queues [14, 34], stack-free parentheses matching [25,30, 36], and most recently parallel R-tree on GPUs [15,16, 2].

Middleware for distributed applications over mobile devices: This thrust includes middleware and embedded software work, namely System on Mobile Devices (SyD) [1,2,3,9, 13, 15, 20, 21, 24] for collaborative distributed computing over networked, heterogeneous and possibly mobile devices and data sources, including the Web services. SyD’s web coordination bond artifacts not only solve the outstanding problems of creating travel and meeting schedules with automatic triggering, renegotiation and rescheduling [66, 75]; these have also been shown to be capable of modeling Petrinets and expressing all the established workflow and communication patterns [4, 7, 10, 12, 14, 18, 22]. Several patent applications have also resulted [Patent # 6-22]

Educational Leadership

Department Chair, Computer Science, UTSA: I have chaired the Computer Science Department at UTSA (2019-22), leading it successfully through its Academic Program Review and National Research University Fund review, and establish two new masters programs in Cybrsecurity and AI.

Graduate Director: I have dedicated 29 years of service at Georgia State University (GSU) for creation of a comprehensive Computer Science program (CS), including leading the creation of M.S. thesis only program in 1996, creating CS department in 1998, a Ph.D. program in 2000 as its founding graduate director, and helping recruit outstanding faculty, several with NSF CAREER awards. As a result, National Research Council ranked our PhD program in the top 40-80 in 2010 – a remarkable feat for a 10-year old program

NSF-supported TCPP Curriculum on Parallel and Distributed Computing for Undergraduates: As TCPP chair, initiated and have led an initiative to update the prevailing CS/CE undergraduate curriculum to incorporate parallel and distributed computing topics throughout. About 130 early adopters are trying the proposed curriculum [18, 19, 21, 22,23] out nationally and internationally; the EduPar workshop series [13,14,15] has been held at IPDPS since 2011, the EduHPC workshop series has been held at SC since 2013, the EURO-EduPar has started at Euro-Par in 2015, and the EduHiPC is starting at HiPC/India in 2018 (http://www.cs.gsu.edu/∼tcpp/curriculum). These high-impact STEM related activities has resulted in a recent center-level CRI grant from NSF, 2012 TCPP Outstanding Service Award, and invitations for several keynotes. An edited book we published for instructors and students of lower level core courses on PDC education in Sept’15 in both hardcopy and free preprint on web - http://grid.cs.gsu.edu/∼tcpp/curriculum/?q=cedr_book - on the last check has over 27K downloads.