Roy Campbell is the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Director of Graduate Programs, Director of the NSA Designated Center for Academic Excellence and Research in Information Assurance, Director of the Air Force funded Assured Cloud Computing Center at the Information Trust Institute, and 2013-2014 Chair of the University Senate. He is also an Affiliate Faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and member of both the Coordinated Sciences Laboratory and Information Trust Institute. He received his Honors B.S. Degree in Mathematics, with a Minor in Physics from the University of Sussex in 1969 and his M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in Computer Science from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1972 and 1976, respectively. Professor Campbell's research interests are the problems, engineering and construction techniques of complex system software. Cloud computing, big data, security, distributed systems, continuous media, and realtime control pose system challenges, especially to operating system designers. Past research includes path expressions as declarative specifications of process synchronization, real-time deadline recovery mechanisms, error recovery in asynchronous systems, streaming video for the web, real-time internet video distribution systems, object-oriented parallel processing operating systems, CORBA security architectures, and active spaces in ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Current research interests include cloud computing, map/reduce scheduling and resource allocation, big data storage issues, distributed monitoring, and Power Grid SCADA security. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.
Isaac Cann joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001 after studying Animal Science at the University of Ghana and later earning his Ph.D. in Rumen Microbiology from Mie University, Japan. He is a Professor of Microbiology and Animal Sciences. In 2013, he became the Deputy Director of the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) funded by BP, and he provides management and oversight for all EBI activities at Illinois. Dr. Cann’s research program focuses on the discovery and characterization of genes and the corresponding enzymes that catalyze efficient conversion of cellulose to sugars. His laboratory also uses biochemical and genomic approaches to study the evolutionary relationships of DNA replication proteins, specifically in archaeal/eukaryotic lineages. He was a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2003.
Deming Chen is an Associate Professor in ECE of UIUC. He is an expert on system-level design space exploration and novel algorithms development for large-scale systems, programmability and performance portability for heterogeneous computing platforms, and reconfigurable computing (which uses FPGAs to accelerate computation tasks). He received four best paper awards in these areas. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 2008 and the ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2010. He has been developing new algorithms and tools for sequence assembly and sequence data sets error correction. He participated in a project that developed a novel framework, called TIGER for sequence assembly. The basic idea behind TIGER is to decompose the assembly problem into smaller sub-problems so that each sub-problem can be managed more efficiently and effectively in terms of resource usage and quality result. TIGER not only demonstrates great scalability dealing with large amount of NGS reads, but also outperforms the state-of-the-art assemblers for several large genomes.
Currently, Dr. Chen is leading an effort for a project to correct errors in large amount of NGS reads. The main challenge is that current methods either cannot handle large genome or require large memory to be effective. This scalability issue is solved by using a novel Bloom Filter based error correction method. Experimental results show that the new method generates more accurate results than previous algorithms while consuming only 5% of the memory usage.
Bruce Fouke received his Ph.D. in Geology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is a professor in the Departments of Geology and Microbiology, and the Biocomplexity Theme in the Institute for Genomic Biology, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He also serves as Director of the Roy J. Carver Biotechnology Center. His ongoing geomicrobiology research is focused on determining how the activity of specific living microbes or microbial communities can influence the precipitation of common carbonate mineral deposits. Results from these studies are providing a fundamental knowledge of microbe-water-mineral interactions during carbonate precipitation that are required to more accurately reconstruct the history of microbial life on earth and other planets. In 2011, Dr. Fouke was a Visiting Fellow at the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies at Lund University in Sweden.
Dr. Fouke specializes in integrated geological and genome-enabled biological studies of: (1) the control of sea surface temperature on coral reef ecosystems of the Caribbean and Indo-Pacific and the associated global emergence of infectious marine diseases; (2) the response of heat-loving (thermophilic) bacteria in Yellowstone and Turkey to changes in hot-spring water flow rate, chemistry and temperature; (3) microbially enhanced hydrocarbon recovery in deep subsurface oil and gas rock reservoirs of Canada, Alaska and Ireland; and (4) the chemistry, microbial communities and timing and of the last flow of water in the aqueducts of ancient Rome and Pompeii.
Wen-mei W. Hwu is a Professor and holds the Sanders-AMD Endowed Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are in the area of architecture, implementation, compilation, and algorithms for parallel computing. He is the chief scientist of Parallel Computing Institute and director of the IMPACT research group (impact.crhc.illinois.edu). He is a co-founder and CTO of MulticoreWare. For his contributions in research and teaching, he received the ACM SigArch Maurice Wilkes Award, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the ISCA Influential Paper Award, and the Distinguished Alumni Award in Computer Science of the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow of IEEE and ACM. He directs the UIUC CUDA Center of Excellence and serves as one of the principal investigators of the $208M NSF Blue Waters Petascale computer project. Dr. Hwu received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Ravishankar K. Iyer is the George and Ann Fisher Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds appointments in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) and the Department of Computer Science. He also serves as Director of the Center for Reliable and High-Performance Computing at Illinois and as Chief Scientist of the Information Trust Institute. Previously, he was the Director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory (2000 – 2008) and Interim Vice-Chancellor for Research from 2008 - 2011. He currently leads the Trusted Illiac project at Illinois. Funded by both industry and government, the project is developing adaptive, application-aware architectures supporting a wide range of dependability and security requirements. He has received several awards, including the Humboldt Foundation Senior Distinguished Scientist Award, the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics Information Systems Medal, the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, and the 2011 Outstanding Contributions award by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)- Special Interest Group on Security (SIGSAC. Professor Iyer is also the recipient of the degree of Doctor Honaris Causa from France’s Toulouse Sabatier University in recognition of his outstanding research contributions in dependable computing and for his extensive collaboration with CNRS/LAAS in Toulouse.
Victor Jongeneel was trained as a biologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Microbiology and Immunology. He went on to do post-doctoral work in molecular virology with Bruce Alberts at the University of California, San Francisco, and with Bernhard Hirt at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research. From 1986 to 1997, he was a group leader at the Lausanne Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, working on the genetics and regulation of the tumor necrosis factor locus. From 1998 to 2006 he was the Director of the Office of Information Technology of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, and from 2003 to 2007 of the Vital-IT high-performance computing facility of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. He is one of the founding members of the SIB, and was its first director. From 2007 to 2009 he was Vice-President for Research at the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia. He came to the University of Illinois in March 2010; he has a dual appointment at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Institute for Genomic Biology, and is an Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering. Since early 2012 he has been leading the High-Performance Biological Computing group, which provides infrastructure, training, services and applied R&D to the biomedical research community at Illinois.
Radhika Khetani received her bachelor’s degree in Life Sciences, with a specialization in Biotechnology, from St. Xavier’s College in Bombay, India. This was followed by a master’s degree in Biotechnology from the University of Bombay. She was trained as a molecular biologist, and obtained her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology, from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, US, in 2006. During her time as a graduate student, she worked with the team developing and testing a new motif finder for novel DNA motifs, called SCOPE. She then worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Dartmouth College with Dr. Sharon Bickel, studying the process of chromosome segregation during female oogenesis in Drosophila melanogaster, until 2008. In 2009 she joined Dr. Matthew Hudson’s group, at the University of Illinois, as a post-doctoral researcher, to study the impact of stress factors on the health of honey bees. This study included many different aspects of genomics, from RNA-Seq and transcriptome assemblies, to metatranscriptomic analysis. She started working as the Technical Lead for User Support and Training with the High-Performance Biological Computing (HPCBio) group at the University of Illinois, in July 2012. At HPCBio, she is involved in a diverse set of customer projects; and is in charge of organizing and teaching workshops for biologists looking to perform bioinformatic analyses on their own.
Steven S. Lumetta is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds an AB in Physics (1991) and both MS (1994) and PhD (1998) in Computer Science, all from the University of California at Berkeley. His technical interests are broad, including a wide range of computer software and hardware design issues. Recent projects include coherence models and mechanisms for the Rigel 1000-core accelerator and software tools for improving automatic feedback on programming assignments. He was also one of the original team that brought the Blue Waters supercomputer to UIUC. He is currently helping to create a community of computational genomics researchers.
Jian Ma received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Pennsylvania State University, and did postdoctoral training with David Haussler at University of California, Santa Cruz. He joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering. His long-term research goal is to understand how phenotype (at the cellular and organism levels) is generated from genotype and to shed new light on disease mechanisms, such as cancer. Dr. Ma’s interdisciplinary work combines genomics, computational innovation, engineering principles, and medical sciences. He has received numerous awards, including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2010 to study large-scale genomic changes in mammalian genomes.
Jian Ma works on computational genomics. The research in his lab develops novel computational methods to explore the human genome, integrating comparative genomics data to elucidate crossspecies differences and within-species variation and their relationships with phenotypic diversity. Recent research projects have involved novel methods development for genome comparisons and annotations to facilitate the study of both coding and non-coding genome sequences. The research group is also actively developing projects in cancer genomics. High-throughput next-generation sequencing technology is heavily utilized.
Gene E. Robinson obtained his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1986 and joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989. He holds a University Swanlund Chair and is also the director of the Institute for Genomic Biology and director of the Bee Research Facility. He served as director of the Neuroscience Program from 2001-2011 and was leader of the Neural and Behavioral Plasticity Theme at the Institute for Genomic Biology from 2004-201 prior to becoming director. He is the author or co-author of approximately 250 publications, including 25 articles published in Science or Nature; has been the recipient or co-recipient of over $41M in funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, US Department of Agriculture and private foundations; pioneered the application of genomics to the study of social behavior; led the effort to gain approval from the National Institutes of Health for sequencing the honey bee genome; and heads the Honey Bee Genome Sequencing Consortium. Dr. Robinson’s honors include: University Scholar and member of the Center of Advanced Study at the University of Illinois; Burroughs Wellcome Innovation Award in Functional Genomics; Founders Memorial Award from the Entomological Society of America; Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship; Guggenheim Fellowship; NIH Pioneer Award; Fellow, Animal Behavior Society; Fellow, Entomological Society of America; Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
Gene Robinson's laboratory studies the mechanisms and evolution of animal social life, using social insects as primary models. Social insects live in extraordinarily complex and cohesive societies, where many individuals sacrifice their personal reproduction to help others with their offspring and allocate their labor to all their society's needs in a variety of intricate ways. Identifying adaptive molecular changes involved in social evolution in insects is important for understanding the mechanisms underlying transitions from solitary to social living, as well as the maintenance and elaboration of social life. We develop large-scale genomic resources to address these issues, especially in bees that represent different levels of sociality, from solitary to highly social. These resources include brain transcriptomes, epigenomes, and whole genomes. Drawing from whole genome comparisons, candidate gene approaches, and a genome-scale, comparative analysis of protein-coding sequence, we have made novel discoveries related to several major biological processes implicated in social evolution, including chemical signaling, brain development and function, reproduction, metabolism, and nutrition. As sequencing costs continue to decrease, we expect to sequence hundreds, if not thousands, of genomes to increase the breadth and depth of our analyses; increased computing power and better computational tools will be necessary to extract and synthesize the knowledge and insights latent in these genomes.
William H. Sanders is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering and the Director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory (www.csl.illinois.edu) at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. He is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Affiliate Professor in the Department of Computer Science. Dr. Sanders is a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM, a past Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing, and past Vice-Chair of the IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing. He was the founding Director of the Information Trust Institute (www.iti.illinois.edu) at Illinois. Dr. Sanders’s research interests include secure and dependable computing and security and dependability metrics and evaluation, with a focus on critical infrastructures. He has published more than 200 technical papers in those areas. He is currently the Director and PI of the DOE/DHS Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIPG) Center (www.tcipg.org), which is at the forefront of national efforts to make the U.S. power grid smart and resilient.
Dr. Sanders is co-developer of three tools for assessing computer-based systems: METASAN, UltraSAN, and Möbius. Möbius and UltraSAN have been distributed widely to industry and academia; more than 500 licenses for the tools have been issued to universities, companies, and NASA for evaluating the performance, dependability, and security of a variety of systems. He is also a co-developer of the Loki distributed system fault injector, the AQuA/ITUA middlewares for providing dependability/security to distributed and networked applications, and the NetAPT (Network Access Policy Tool) for assessing the security of networked systems.
Saurabh Sinha received his B.S. in Computer Science from I.I.T. Kanpur in 1997 and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2002. After post-doctoral work at the Rockefeller University, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2005. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, faculty of the Institute of Genomic Biology, and an affiliate of the Biophysics program, the Neuroscience Program, and the Department of Entomology. He chairs the M.S. Bioinformatics program of the department of Computer Science, and leads the educational program of the Mayo Clinic-University of Illinois Alliance. He is PI on an NSF CAREER award and an NIH R01 grant, and has been co-PI on grants awarded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and US Department of Agriculture. He is the author or co-author of over 65 publications and patents, including articles published in PLoS Biology, Developmental Cell, PNAS, Genome Research, Science and Nature. He has made significant contributions to several open problems in bioinformatics, including motif discovery, genome-wide enhancer prediction, modeling of regulatory sequence evolution and quantitative modeling of the cis-regulatory code. Dr. Sinha was named a Faculty Fellow of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 2007, a Faculty Fellow of the Center of Advanced Study at the University of Illinois in 2009, and was awarded the Dean's Award for Excellence in Research from the College of Engineering in 2013.
Dr. Sinha’s laboratory works on problems in computational genomics, more specifically in regulatory and evolutionary genomics. His laboratory builds and uses computational tools to annotate the non-coding genome with regulatory sequences, and then models how these regulatory elements function and evolve. Approaches are built around machine learning methods such as Hidden Markov models, mathematical models of sequence evolution, biophysical concepts, and statistical theory. Dr. Sinha and his group expect that a specialized computational genomics hardware infrastructure will help them address the challenges associated with scaling their methods to large numbers of genomes. By enabling a scale and speed of analysis that they cannot achieve on traditional hardware, it will also help them define novel functionalities that push the boundaries of computational genomics.
Lisa Stubbs received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego, and was a postdoctoral research associate at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and the European Molecular Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. She was recruited to become a Professor in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009, after spending many years as a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Her research combines mouse genetics, bioinformatics and genomic methods to explore cis- and trans-acting components of mammalian gene regulatory machinery. Dr. Stubbs is particularly interested in those components of the regulatory machinery that have changed over evolutionary time. She has authored over 100 peer reviewed publications.
Professor Stubbs’ focus is on mechanisms of gene regulation during development and how those mechanisms have evolved in vertebrate species, especially mammals. Her work involves genome comparisons to search for conserved and non-conserved DNA sequence elements including regulatory DNA sequences and genes, especially those genes that encode regulatory proteins (transcription factors). Her research involves both computational analysis and experimental studies, including cell-based studies and transgenic and mutant mouse studies, to identify gene function and to study the interactions between transcription factor proteins and genomic DNA.
Madhavan Mukund is Professor and Dean of Studies at Chennai Mathematical Institute. His main area of research is formal methods for specification and verification of computing systems.
Dr. Mukund Thattai obtained a B.A. in physics from Cornell University in 1999, and a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004. While at MIT, Dr. Thattai made pioneering contributions to the understanding of how the randomness of molecular processes can affect living cells. He is currently a tenured professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India, where he heads an independent research group. His laboratory at NCBS works in the area of synthetic biology, an emerging field which attempts to combine genes into biological circuits, much as transistors are combined into electrical circuits.
Vipin Chaudhary is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Center for Computational Research, and the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences at University at Buffalo, SUNY. He is the founder of the Data Intensive Discovery Initiative and the Center for Computational and Data Driven Science and Engineering at SUNY Buffalo. He is also the President of Scalable Informatics, Inc., a leading provider of high performance software-defined storage and compute solutions. From 2010 to 2013, Dr. Chaudhary was the Chief Executive Officer of Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) where he grew the company globally to be the HPC cloud and solutions leader before selling it to Tata Consulting Services. Prior to this, as Senior Director of Advanced Development at Cradle Technologies, Inc., he was responsible for advanced programming tools for multi-processor chips. He was the Chief Architect at Corio Inc., which had a successful IPO in June 2000.
His current research interests are in the area of High Performance and Big Data Computing and its applications to scientific, engineering, financial, social, and medical applications; and Computer Assisted Diagnosis and Interventions.
Vinod Prabhakaran is with the School of Technology & Computer Science, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai. He received his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 2007 and was a post-doctoral researcher at Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign during 2008-10. His research interests are in Information Theory, Cryptography, and Signal Processing.
Prof. K. S. Krishnan is a physicist and began his research career with a PhD in Biophysics from IISc Bangalore. His research at TIFR was primarily addressing cellular and molecular mechanism of synaptic release and vesicle recycling by genetic methods. He has at NCBS, in collaboration with other investigators begun a major initiative to identify and characterize neuro-active compounds from toxin peptides present in animals including marine snails, wasps, and frog skin secretions with a view to examine their therapeutic value.
Onkar Dabeer got his PhD from University of California San Diego in 2002, and his B.Tech and M.Tech degrees from IIT Bombay in 1996 and 1998 respectively. His research interests are in estimation/inference problems in large datasets and wireless communications. He is a recipient of several early carrer awards in India such as the Homi Bhabha Fellowship, the INSA medal for young scientists etc. He has also served on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (2008-2011).
Dr. Bipin Rajendran is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at I.I.T. Bombay. Previously, he was a Master Inventor and Research Staff Member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, engaged in exploratory research on non-volatile memories and neuromorphic computation. He has published more than 30 papers in peer reviewed journals and conferences, and has been issued 30 US patents. He has also taught a graduate course on Neuromorphic Engineering in the Engineering school at Columbia University. He received a B.Tech degree (2000) from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and M.S (2003) and Ph.D (2006) in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
Dr. Rajendra Joshi is presently working as “Associate Director and HoD” of the Bioinformatics Group at the Centre Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) at Pune. He has a doctorate in Biochemistry from the National Chemical Laboratory at the University of Pune, and has been associated with the area of Biotechnology & Bioinformatics for about 23 years. He has over 18 years of experience in the area of Bioinformatics, which includes experience as a researcher, faculty member at the Bioinformatics Centre, University of Pune and project manager. He is a member of the International Society of Computational Biology. He is primarily responsible for building a strong bioinformatics group at C-DAC and presently directs projects taken up by the group. His major area of expertise is in the use of high performance parallel computers for biological research. His main research interests include, molecular dynamics simulations of nucleic acids & proteins, genome sequence analysis, metabolic pathways, development of Problem Solving Environments, and parallel & grid computing. He is a principal investigator for funded projects and other contract research projects, leading to a number of publications in international journals and conferences. His career objective is to build an environment where much of biology could be understood using high performance parallel computers.
Spenta R. Wadia is a Distinguished Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), and the Director of TIFR's International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, in Bangalore.
He is a theoretical physicist working in the areas of Elementary Particle Physics, Quantum Gravity and String Theory
Dr Leena Chandran-Wadia received her Ph.D in physics from IISc Bangalore. Both her thesis work and her post-doctoral research, at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, involved High Performance Computing. She has been a researcher at several places in India and abroad including NCST Mumbai (now CDAC), EPFL and CERN in Switzerland. More recently she has served as Senior VP and CTO at Netcore Solutions Pvt. Ltd., a start-up company in the space of Mobile Value-Added Services.
At ORF Mumbai, which is an independent, non-partisan, public policy think tank, she is engaged in research and advocacy primarily in the areas of Higher Education and Research.
Prof. Navneet Goyal: Ph.D. in Mathematics from IIT Roorkee with 18 years of post Ph.D. experience at BITS-Pilani. Currently, Head of the Computer Science Department with research interests in HPC for Big Data Analytics, Incremental & Parallel Data Mining Algorithms, Data Mining Applications, & Data Modelling.
Sandeep is a Professor at the School of Technology and Computer Science at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. He received his B. Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Delhi and his M. S. in Statistics and Ph.D. in Operations Research from Stanford University. He has taught at IIT Delhi before joining TIFR. He has held visiting positions at many places including at Columbia University, Stanford University, University of Twente and Indian School of Business. In the year 2008, he was on leave from TIFR and headed the quantitative activity in Bank of America’s Indian operations. He was then also the member of the Bank of America’s global executive quantitative council. He is currently on the editorial board of Mathematics of Operations Research. Earlier he has been on editorial boards of Management Science and ACM TOMACS. His research interests lie in applied probability including in simulation theory, financial mathematics and game theoretic analysis of queues.
Dr. Himanshu Sinha: Ph.D. University of Cambridge, Postdocs at Duke Univ. Medical Center, Durham NC, USA and European Molecular Biology Lab, Heidelberg, Germany Currently working as Reader at Department of Biological Sciences, TIFR Mumbai Interested in dissecting functional genotype-phenotype relationships of complex multi-genic traits using yeast as model
Ankur Narang has 18+ years experience in leadership positions in Research and Development. He currently works at IBM Research India, where he is Research Lead for the High Performance Analytics group. His areas of research include design and implementation of parallel algorithms for supercomputers such as Blue Gene/P as well as Intel Clusters and hybrid GPU-based architectures in domains such as Computational Biology / Computational Geophysics / Machine Learning & Data mining / Graph Algorithms; distributed scheduling on large-scale distributed memory architectures, parallelyzing compilers including partitioning, scheduling and routing on Massively Parallel Supercomputers and algorithms for VLSI automation including model-checking algorithms. He has around 25 publications in top computer science conferences and journals along with 5 granted US patents and around 10 patents pending approval. He has been in program committees of multiple conferences and is senior member IEEE. He completed B.Tech (Computer Science & Engg.) from IIT Delhi (1994) and M.S. from Santa Clara University (2000).
Aparna Radhakrishnan: I have just completed my PhD from the University of Cambridge and currently affiliated to Department of Biological Sciences, TIFR. My PhD involved the application of statistical genetics to understanding platelet biology. Prior to my PhD, I worked at Strand Life Sciences, Bangalore after completing the postgraduate diploma in Bioinformatics from Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology. I also have a MSc. Biotechnology from Bangalore University and BSc. Microbiology from University of Mumbai.
Anupama Yadav: I am an Int. PhD student under Dr. Himanshu Sinha, Department of Biological Sciences, TIFR. I completed my bachelors in Microbiology from Delhi University. I worked on metagenomics in soil ecology and fungal characterization during my bachelors. For my PhD, I work on understanding variation in growth in different environmental conditions in budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. My project deals with wet bench work which includes culture work and molecular biology in yeast and, analysis which includes bio-statistics using R and python.
Chiranjib Bhattacharyya is currently an Associate Prof. in the Dept of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science. His research interest is in Computational aspects of Machine Learning and he is the convenor of Machine Learning Lab. For more information of his research please see http://mllab.csa.iisc.ernet.in
Harikrishna Narasimhan is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science and Automation at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, working with Prof. Shivani Agarwal. He is the recipient of the Google India PhD Fellowship in Machine Learning for 2013. He obtained an M.E. in CSE from the same department and a B.E. in CSE from College of Engineering, Guindy, Anna University, Chennai. He has received several awards for academic excellence including the Computer Society of India (Bangalore Chapter) Medal for best M.E. CSE student, a Gold Medal for first rank in B.E. CSE and awards for best outgoing student in the B.E. programme. His research interests include machine learning, optimization, learning theory, and applications in life sciences.
Dr. Vivek Damle has over 20 years of experience in the areas of general management, sales and marketing, industry analysis, high-tech research, and business development. He oversees the Global Operations and Corporate Development activities of SkillNet Solutions Inc. U.S.A., a silicon valley based software consulting company. He is the Chairman & Managing Director of SkillNet Solutions India Private Limited (SSIPL), a Mumbai based software development company and is responsible for the coordination between the India Development Center, EMEA, Asia-Pacific operations, and the US office.
Dr. Vivek serves as the Chairman of Savida Agri-Com, a global agri-business consulting firm and he is the founder of aginformex.com, nutraindia.com, and indianfarmer.org. Previously, he has worked in the seed industry and agri–biotech sector starting from Indo American Hybrid Seeds, University of Illinois, and was a consultant to Monsanto Company in the U.S.A. and India.
Dr. Sagarika Vivek Damle: M. Sc., Ph.D. in Botany(Plant Sciences),Associate Professor in the Department of Life Sciences, K. C. College (Affiliated to the University of Mumbai)
Sharmila Mande heads the Bio-Sciences R&D activities at TCS’ Innovation Labs. She received her PhD in the year 1991 from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. During her close to twelve years at TCS, she has successfully built a group of Bioinformaticians, and trained many of them, including engineers, mathematicians, physicists and biologists in this field.
Her main theme of research has been on development of efficient algorithms and software solutions that attempt to address challenges faced by researchers in analyzing genomic and metagenomics data generated by Next Generation Sequencing technologies. She has been actively involved in the study on 'Gut microbiome' to understand malnourishment through metagenomics approach. She is one of the principal investigators in a IndoDanish project on 'Gut microbiome and diabetes'. She is also one of the PIs in an ongoing National level project on 'Systems Biology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis'.