Speakers
Ilkay Altintas, Ph.D
Deputy Coordinator for Research, SDSC
Lab Director, Scientific Workflow Automation Technologies
Expertise: Scientific Workflows, Provenance, Distributed Computing, Observatory Systems
Ilkay Altintas, Ph.D. is the Director for the Scientific Workflow Automation Technologies Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), UC San Diego where she also is the Deputy Coordinator for Research. Since joining SDSC in 2001, she has worked on different aspects of scientific workflows as a principal investigator and in other leadership roles across a wide range of cross-disciplinary NSF, DOE and Moore Foundation projects. She is a co-initiator of and an active contributor to the open-source Kepler Scientific Workflow System, and the co-author of publications related to eScience at the intersection of scientific workflows, provenance, distributed computing, bioinformatics, observatory systems, conceptual data querying, and software modeling. Ilkay Altintas received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands with an emphasis on provenance of workflow-driven collaborative science and she is currently an assistant research scientist at UC San Diego.
Natasha Balac, Ph.D.
Director, Predictive Analytics Center of Excellence, SDSC
Director of Data Application and Service, SDSC
Expertise: Data mining and analysis, Machine learning, Scientific data management, Data-intensive computing
Natasha Balac, Ph.D. is the Director of Predictive Analytics Center of Excellence at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) encompassing many data mining projects including collaborations with UC San Diego Medical School and UC San Diego 's Smart Energy Grid. Natasha received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University with an emphasis in Machine Learning from large data sets. She has been with SDSC since 2003 leading multiple large projects and collaborations across a wide range of organizations in industry, government and academia including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the California Energy Commission (CEC).
Chaitan Baru, Ph.D.
Associate Director, Data Initiatives, SDSC
Director, Center for Large-scale Data Systems Research (CLDS), SDSC
Expertise: Large-scale data systems, database systems, scientific data management, performance and benchmarking of big data systems, data integration, data analytics.
Chaitan Baru is a Distinguished Scientist and research staff member at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. He has played a leadership role in a number of national-scale cyberinfrastructure R&D initiatives across a wide range of science disciplines from earth sciences to ecology, biomedical informatics, and healthcare. One of his current initiatives is an industry-academia effort to define big data benchmarks and establish a BigData Top100 List (see www.bigdatatop100.org). He also coordinates the SDSC Data Science Institute initiative for education and training in data science. Prior to joining SDSC in 1996, Baru was involved in the development of IBM's early UNIX-based shared-nothing database systems (DB2 Parallel Edition), where he also led a team that produced the industry's first result for a decision support benchmark (TPC-D). Baru has also served on the faculty of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has a B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras; and ME and PhD from the University of Florida, all in Electrical Engineering.
Amit Chourasia, Ph.D.
Senior Visualization Scientist
Amit Chourasia leads the Visualization Services group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). His work is focused on research, development and application of software tools and techniques for visualization. Key portion of his work is to find ways to represent data in a visual form that is clear, succinct and accurate - a challenging yet very exciting endeavor.
Amarnath Gupta, Ph.D.
Director, Advanced Query Processing Lab, SDSC
Expertise: Information Integration, Semantic Information Infrastructure, Graph Data Management, Event Modeling
Amarnath Gupta received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Jadavpur University in India. He is currently a full Research Scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center of UC San Diego, and directs the Advanced Query Processing Lab. His primary areas of research include semantic information integration, large-scale graph databases, ontology management, event data management and query processing techniques. Before joining UC San Diego, he was the Chief Scientist at Virage, Inc., a startup company in multimedia information systems. Dr. Gupta has authored over 100 papers and a book on Event Modeling, holds 13 patents and is a recipient of the 2011 ACM Distinguished Scientist award.
Wayne Pfeiffer, Ph.D.
Distinguished Scientist, SDSC
Expertise: Supercomputer performance analysis, Novel computer architectures, Bioinformatics
Wayne Pfeiffer studied math, physics, and nuclear engineering in college and graduate school. After obtaining a PhD from Caltech, he joined General Atomics where he did research and development related to nuclear fission and fusion. Subsequently he helped found SDSC and served as a department manager and deputy director. In recent years he has been doing research in computer performance analysis and bioinformatics. Besides his work, he enjoys outdoor activities such as running, cycling, mountain climbing, and skiing.
Julia Ponomarenko, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator, UCSD San Diego Supercomputer Center
Expertise: Bioinformatics, Immunoinformatics, Databases and Software, Protein Structure, Genomics
Julia Ponomarenko, Ph.D., is Principal Investigator for the National Institute of Health. Her research involves the development of the Immune Epitope Database and Analysis Resource (IEDB), computational studies of gene transcriptional regulation in mammals, and protein/DNA structural informatics. Julia is also Director and Instructor of the Bioinformatics courses for the Biomedical and Bioinformatics graduate programs at UCSD and Lecturer at UCSD Extension. Dr. Ponomarenko obtained her M.Sc. in Physics from Novosibirsk State University (ranked among the top three universities in Russia) and Ph.D. in Biology from the Russian Academy of Science. During her career in Russia and for the last 11 years at SDSC, she has initiated, lead, and developed several high-profiled bioinformatics resources and did pioneering work on predicting gene regulatory sites and effect of SNPs in eukaryotic genomes, using DNA structural information.
Paul Rodriguez, Ph.D.
Research Programmer / Analyst
Paul Rodriguez received his PhD in Cognitive Science at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1999. He spent several years doing research in neural network modeling, dynamical systems simulations, time series analysis, and statistical methods for analysis and predictions in fMRI data. He has more recently worked in data mining for health care fraud identification, and optimization of data intensive network flow models.
Mahidhar Tatineni, Ph.D.
Research Programmer Analyst
Mahidhar Tatineni received his M.S. & Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from UCLA. He currently leads the User Services group at SDSC and has done many optimization and parallelization projects on the supercomputing resources including Gordon.
Rick Wagner, Ph.D. Candidate
HPC Systems Manager
Expertise: Linux Clusters, Astrophysics
Rick Wagner is the High Performance Computing Systems Manager at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and a Ph.D. Candidate in Physics at the University of California, San Diego focusing his research on analyzing simulations of supersonic turbulence. In his managerial role, Rick has technical and operational responsibility for two of the NSF-funded Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) HPC clusters, Trestles and Gordon, and SDSC's Data Oasis parallel file systems. He has also worked with Argonne National Laboratory on coupling remote large-scale visualization resources to tiled display walls over dynamic circuits networks on the Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network. Rick's other interests include promoting the sharing of astrophysical simulations through standardized metadata descriptions and access protocols, and he is currently serving as the Vice-Chair of the Theory Interest Group of the International Virtual Astronomical Observatory. His latest side project involves working with undergraduates to develop course materials on parallel programming for middle and high school students using Raspberry Pis.