University of Hyderabad, India
Arun Agarwal completed his B.Tech (Electrical Engineering) in 1979 and PhD (Computer Science) in 1989, both from IIT Delhi. In 1984, he joined the University of Hyderabad, where he is a professor and dead of the Department of Computer/Information Sciences and professor-in-charge of the Centre for Modeling Simulation and Design.
Agarwal was a visiting scientist at The Robotics Institute, Carnegie-Mellon University and a research associate at Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been participating actively in the PRAGMA Workshops.
He is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Pattern Recognition (RBCS) and Engineering Letters of International Association of Engineers. He is also a fellow of IETE, senior member of IEEE; and a member of the board of studies of several universities. He was chairman of IEEE Hyderabad Section for the years 2001 and 2002.
He has served on the technical program committee of numerous conferences in the area of pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. He has served as the committee chair of a number of these conferences. He is also on the steering committee of PRAGMA. He is a member of GARUDA project, a national initiative on grid computing in India.
His areas of interest are in computer vision, image processing, neural networks and grid computing. He has guided more than 100 post-graduate dissertations and has published more than 75 papers. He has several projects and consultancy in hand with several industry/research laboratories.
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Peter Bajcsy is a research scientist with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he works on problems related to automatic transfer of image content to knowledge within the framework of X-informatics, where X stands for hydro, geo, remote sensing, bio, medical image and advanced sensing. His scientific interests include image and signal processing, statistical data analysis, data mining, pattern recognition, novel sensor technology, and computer and machine vision.
National Biomedical Computation Resource, San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California, San Diego
Sriram Krishnan joined the Grid Development Group at SDSC in October 2004 to work for the National Biomedical Computation Resource (NBCR), UCSD. His interests include designing and implementing a Web services-based infrastructure for biomedical applications that is secure and scalable, and is conducive to the creation of complex workflows. More information on his work for NBCR is available at http://nbcr.net/services/. Since mid 2006, he has also been involved in expanding the infrastructure for the CAMERA project, catering to the needs of the metagenomics community. Prior to SDSC, he was a graduate student at the Computer Science Department at Indiana University from 1999 to 2004 where he obtained his Ph.D. His thesis was titled "An Architecture for Checkpointing and Migration of Distributed Components on the Grid." His expertise is generally in the area of Grid systems, in particular, Web service and component technologies, and Grid middleware. He also maintains an active interest in areas of fault tolerance and peer-to-peer systems. He received an undergraduate degree in computer engineering from the University of Mumbai, India. He had also spent one summer each at the Argonne National Laboratory (2002) and IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center (2003).
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Sudhakar Pamidighantam has been a consulting and research scientist for high-performance computing and applications at NCSA for the last 10 years. He received his Ph. D. from University of Alabama at Birmingham after spending a couple of preparatory years at IISc Bangalore and graduating with an M.Sc. from University of Hydearbad, India. Pamidighantam provides scientific consulting services for chemistry and computational biology communities at NCSA and deployed Chemviz, the chemistry educational portal, with integration of NCSA Condor resources. He developed and integrated a quantum chemistry remote job monitoring technologies deployed at PACI partner systems in 1998, which evolved into the GridChem cyberinfrastructure and continues to serve high-performance computational chemistry and molecular modeling research and education communities.
University of California at San Diego / California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
Larry Smarr is director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology and Harry E. Gruber professor in the Jacobs School's Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD. During his career, he has pursued basic research in a wide variety of fields, first in general relativity, then computational and observational astronomy, now in the computer science and electrical engineering of large-scale optical networks. Smarr is principal investigator on the NSF OptIPuter LambdaGrid project, the Moore Foundation CAMERA marine microbial metagenomics project, and is co-PI on the NSF LOOKING ocean observatory prototype and the Quartzite campus LambdaGrid infrastructure project.
As founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the National Computational Science Alliance, Smarr has driven major contributions to the development of the national information infrastructure: the Internet, the Web, the emerging Grid, collaboratories, and scientific visualization. He was a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee for President Clinton and served until 2005 on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health and the NASA Advisory Council. He was named a member of the California Governor's Task Force on Broadband in December 2006.
He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1990 he received the Franklin Institute's Delmer S. Fahrney Gold Medal for Leadership in Science or Technology. In 2006 he was presented with the ESRI Lifetime Achievement Award and received the IEEE Computer Society Tsutomu Kanai Award for distributed computing systems achievements. He is a USC Annenberg Fellow and a Crick-Jacobs Senior Fellow at La Jolla's Salk Institute.
Argonne National Laboratory / The University of Chicago
Rick Stevens is a professor in the University of Chicago's Department of Computer Science, a senior fellow in the Computation Institute and associate laboratory director for Computing and Life Science at Argonne National Laboratory. Stevens is the director of Argonne's research initiatives in petascale computing and systems biology, the principle investigator for the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and leads an NIH Bioinformatics Research Center for Microbial Pathogens and an NSF TeraGrid Life Science Gateway Project, which is developing high-throughput tools for large-scale biological data analysis. He has been interested in combining the frontiers of computing and biology for over 20 years.
Jilin University, China
Xiaohui Wei, ACM/IEEE member, has a PhD in computer software and theory. He had worked with Platform Computing Inc. (Canada) from 1999 to 2004. Since December 2003, he has been a professor of the College of Computer Science and Technology at Jilin University, China. Currently, he is the director of the Grid Computing and Information Security Lab, Jilin University. His research interests include distributed system, grid computing, fault tolerance and information security.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Donald (Don) J. Wuebbles is the director of the School of Earth, Society, and Environment at the University of Illinois. He is also a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences as well as in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Wuebbles was head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences from 1994 until 2006 before accepting his new position. He earned his B.S. (1970) and M.S. (1972) degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois. He received his Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences from the University of California at Davis in 1983. He is the author of over 380 scientific articles, most of which relate to atmospheric chemistry and global climate change as affected by both human activities and natural phenomena. His research emphasizes the development and use of mathematical models of the atmosphere to study the chemical and physical processes that determine atmospheric structure, aimed primarily toward improving our understanding of the impacts that man-made and natural trace gases may be having on the Earth's climate and on tropospheric and stratospheric chemistry. He has been a lead author on a number of national and international assessments related to these issues. Wuebbles was elected a member of the International Ozone Commission in 2000, and in 2005 received the Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He is also a faculty fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
PRAGMA Grid
Cindy Zheng has been involved with PRAGMA since its inception in 2002. She joined PRAGMA in 2004 and has been working as the coordinator in PRAGMA grid. Prior to joining PRAGMA, Cindy worked at the San Diego Supercomputer Center; she graduated from UCSD with a BA in computer science.
