CSE & IDEaS Distinguished Lecture: Sanjay Ranka

Speaker: Distinguished Professor Sanjay Ranka, University of Florida
Date and Time: October 20, 2:00-4:00 p.m. (Seminar followed by reception)
Location: Coda, Room 230
Host: Regents' Professor Srinivas Aluru, School of CSE faculty and Executive Director of IDEaS

Title: Data Science for Scientific Data Compression and Transportation Applications

Abstract: In this talk, I will present my recent work on developing data science solutions for large scale applications in scientific computing and transportation.

The volume of data generated by scientific applications has continued to outpace the growth of computing power and storage capacities. Unlike video and image compression, scientists require downstream quantities of interest to be conserved along with error bounds on primary data. We have developed novel constrained auto encoders based algorithmic and software pipelines that satisfy both these requirements. For data generated using Tokomak simulation codes that produce petabytes of data using thousands of GPUS, we have shown that our approach can compress the data by two orders of magnitude while requiring less than one percent of computational resources.

Mitigating traffic congestion and improving safety are the cornerstones of transportation. We have developed an ML based edge-cloud based system to analyze and fuse data streams from LIDAR, cameras and ground sensor data for quantifying and impacting pedestrian and vehicle safety. Using the data collected, we are also developing digital twins that model behavior at traffic intersections. The underlying models are useful for detecting interruptions as well as optimizing signal timing plans. We will present experimental results on data collected from real-traffic intersections in the City of Gainesville and City of Orlando.

This work is supported by DOE, NSF, and FDOT.

Bio: Sanjay Ranka is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida. From 1999-2002, as the Chief Technology Officer at Paramark (Sunnyvale, CA), he developed a real-time optimization service called PILOT for marketing campaigns. PILOT served more than 10+ million optimized decisions a day in 2002 with a 99.99% uptime. Paramark was recognized by VentureWire/Technologic Partners as a Top 100 Internet technology company in 2001 and 2002 and was acquired in 2002. Sanjay has also held positions as a tenured faculty member at Syracuse University, academic visitor at IBM and summer researcher at Hitachi America Limited.

He has coauthored one book, four monographs, 340+ journal and refereed conference articles. His recent coauthored work has received a best student paper runner-up award at IGARSS 2015, best paper award at BICOB 2014, best student paper award at ACM-BCB 2010, best paper runner-up award at KDD-2009, a nomination for the Robbins Prize for the best paper in the Journal of Physics in Medicine and Biology in 2008, and a best paper award at ICN 2007. His work has received 15,900+ citations with an h-index of 63 (based on Google Scholar).

He is a fellow of the IEEE, AAAS and AAIA (Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association) and a past member of IFIP Committee on System Modeling and Optimization. He received the 2020 Research Impact Award from IEEE Technical Committee on Cloud Computing and the 2022 Distinguished Alumnus Award from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He is a board member of American Society on Artificial Intelligence.

He is currently an associate editor for ACM Computing Surveys, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Sustainable Computing: Systems and Informatics, Knowledge and Information Systems, and International Journal of Computing. Additionally, he is a book series editor for CRC Press for Bigdata. In the past, he has been an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems and IEEE Transactions on Computers, and an associate editor-in-chief of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. He was a general co-chair for ICDM in 2009, International Green Computing Conference in 2010, International Green Computing Conference in 2011, ACM Conference on Bioinformatics Computational Biology in 2012, and IEEE DataCOM in 2017. He was a program chair for 2013 International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, 2015 High Performance Computing Conference, and a program co-chair for ICDM 2022.

He has consulted for several startups and Fortune 500 companies.