Professor Aref Named University Faculty Scholar
03-29-2004
Professor Walid Aref has been appointed a University Faculty Scholar. The University Faculty Scholars Program recognizes outstanding faculty colleagues who are on an accelerated path for academic distinction. This prestigious recognition goes to only 13 faculty in the School of Science, and CS now has 2 faculty who hold this honor, Professor Walid Aref and Professor Ananth Grama.
Professor Walid Aref joined Purdue in 1999. His research focuses on developing database technologies that address the needs of emerging non-traditional data-intensive applications, e.g., spatial, multimedia, genomics, and sensor database applications. His contributions are in the areas of:
- New query processing algorithms
- Indexing techniques and technologies
- Rank-aware query operators and optimization techniques, and
- Disk scheduling algorithms
In 2001, he received the NSF CAREER award. Walid Aref served as the program committee chair for the 9th ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems in 2001, and co-chair of the 6th International Workshop on Multimedia Information Systems in 2000. He has contributed to undergraduate and graduate curricula by introducing new courses such as the Multimedia Database System course and the Advanced Database Systems course. Professor Aref is actively involved in the Discovery Park Bindley Life Science and the E-enterprise Centers, and is also the co-director of the university-wide Genomics Database Facility.
Professor Ananth Grama has been a University Faculty Scholar since 2002. Professor Grama's research interests span the areas of parallel and distributed computing architectures, algorithms, and applications. His work on distributed infrastructure deals with development of software support for dynamic clustered and multiclustered environments. More recent work has focused on resource location and allocation mechanisms in peer-to-peer networks. His research on applications has focused on particle dynamics methods, their applications to dense linear system solvers, fast algorithms for data compression and analysis. He was awarded the NSF CAREER award in 1998 and the Purdue University School of Science Outstanding Assistant Professor Award in 1999.
Congratulations to our University Faculty Scholars for their contributions to the field and to Purdue!