Speaker Profiles
Every keynote, invited and industry speaker who took part in CARLA 2019.
This page collects the keynote, invited and industry speaker profiles presented at CARLA 2019.
Keynote Speakers
Keynote Speakers
Rosa M. Badia
Manager of the Workflows and Distributed Computing Group, Barcelona Supercomputing Center
Dr. Rosa M. Badia is the manager of the Workflows and Distributed Computing group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). Her current research interests include programming models for distributed computing platforms and their integration with novel storage technologies. Her group has been proposing the task based StarSs programming model, and she is currently focused on the PyCOMPSs and COMPSs instance of this model for distributed computing platforms. This model can be used for the definition of medium grain task based applications or for the definition of coarse grain workflows, which can combine tasks written in other parallel programming models such as OpenMP or MPI. The model also plays well with new concepts for persistent storage and is integrated with the dataClay and Hecuba solutions. Her group has been very active in European funded projects. Dr. Badia has published more than 200 articles in international journals and conferences in the area.
Hervé Goëau
Researcher, CIRAD
Herve Goeau is a computer scientist at CIRAD, the French agricultural research and international cooperation organization working for the sustainable development of tropical and Mediterranean regions, and a member of the AMAP joint research unit in Montpellier, France, an interdisciplinary laboratory conducting primary and advanced applied research on plants and plant communities. His topics of interest include deep learning and large scale fine grained classification applied to living species identification, biodiversity informatics, ecological monitoring, scientific data management, crowdsourcing and citizen science. For the last ten years he has been one of the leading researchers involved in the development of Pl@ntNet, the citizen science project renowned for its mobile plant identification apps used daily by tens of thousands of users around the world. He annually jointly organizes, within the international CLEF Initiative (Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum), the LifeCLEF plant species identification task, an ambitious challenge with several thousand species based on visual content and metadata analysis, that promotes machine learning and computer vision in the biodiversity informatics field. He currently works on advanced applications of machine learning to automated weed detection in cultivated fields, plant disease identification, organ detection and measurement in herbarium collections, and on a global flora identification system based on millions of pictures that require distributed deep learning on GPU clusters and HPC infrastructures.
Antônio Tadeu A. Gomes
Researcher, National Laboratory for Scientific Computing (LNCC), Brazil
Antonio Tadeu A. Gomes is a researcher at the National Laboratory for Scientific Computing (LNCC), Brazil. He is head of the Innovative Parallel Finite Element Solvers (IPES) research group, executive officer of the Brazilian National System for High Performance Computing (SINAPAD) and coordinator of the Steering Committee of the Santos Dumont supercomputing facility (SDumont). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC Rio), Brazil, in 2005. His main research areas are computer networks, distributed systems, high performance computing and software architecture. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC).
Invited Speakers
Invited Speakers
Paola Buitrago
Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Group Leader, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
Paola Buitrago leads the Artificial Intelligence and Big Data group at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Her group is focused on advancing and supporting the convergence of High Performance Computing (HPC), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data. Paola initiated a new platform for AI research on emerging hardware and software technologies, enabling the development of advanced algorithms and modeling approaches. She also leads the PSC Big Data as a Service (BDaaS) initiative, through which Internet scale datasets are integrated with supercomputing resources for cross cutting research communities. Her diverse background includes research in deep learning, large scale data and workflow management for high energy physics experiments at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Paola developed courses in machine learning, simulation and optimization at her university. She is passionate about education in technology and launched an education focused start up. Her academic background includes a Bachelors degree in Chemical Engineering and a Bachelors in Systems and Computing Engineering, plus a Masters from Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia.
Daisuke Kihara
Professor, Department of Computer Science and Department of Biological Sciences, Purdue University
Dr. Kihara is a full professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. He received the B.S. degree from the University of Tokyo, Japan in 1994 and the Ph.D. degree from Kyoto University, Japan in 1999. After studying as a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Jeffrey Skolnick he joined Purdue University in 2003 and was promoted to full professor in 2014. Since 2018 he holds an adjunct professor position at the Department of Pediatrics, University of Cincinnati. He has worked on various topics in protein bioinformatics. His current research covers the development of algorithms for protein protein docking, protein tertiary structure prediction, structure modeling from low resolution image data, structure and sequence based protein function prediction, and computational drug design. He has published over 150 research papers and book chapters, with support from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and industry. He has served on the program committee of various bioinformatics conferences including the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), where he is a track chair in 2019. In 2013 he was named a University Faculty Scholar by Purdue University.
Ignacio Laguna
Computer Scientist, Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Ignacio Laguna is a Computer Scientist at the Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), California. His main area of research is programming models and systems for high performance computing (HPC). He is particularly interested in software correctness, program analysis, compilers, fault tolerance and debugging. He received his PhD degree in Computer Engineering from Purdue University in 2012. He is the recipient of the ACM and IEEE CS George Michael Fellowship in 2014, the Better Scientific Software (BSSw) Fellowship in 2019 and the Hans Meuer Award for best research paper at ISC 2019, and he was a finalist for the R and D 100 Award in 2017. Ignacio is an IEEE Senior Member.
Leonardo Bautista Gomez
Senior Research Scientist, Barcelona Supercomputing Center
Dr. Leonardo Bautista Gomez is a Senior Research Scientist at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, where he works on multiple H2020 European projects related to resilience, energy efficiency and multilevel storage systems for high performance computing. In 2016 he was awarded a European Marie Curie fellowship on Deep memory Ubiquity, Resilience and Optimization. In addition he was awarded the 2016 IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing (Early Career Researcher). Before moving to BSC he was a postdoctoral researcher for three years at the Argonne National Laboratory, where he investigated data corruption detection techniques and error propagation. Prior to that he did his Ph.D. in resilience for supercomputers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He developed a scalable multilevel checkpointing library called the Fault Tolerance Interface (FTI) to guarantee application resilience at extreme scale, work that earned the 2011 ACM and IEEE George Michael Memorial High Performance Computing Ph.D. Fellowship at the Supercomputing Conference 2011 with an Honorable Mention, and a Special Certificate of Recognition for a perfect score at SC11. In Japan he was awarded the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Research Fellowship for Young Scientists. Before moving to Tokyo Tech he graduated in Distributed Systems and Applications from the Paris 6 University, Pierre and Marie Curie, and earlier obtained a Bachelor in Computer Science from the same university.
Etienne Decencière
Professor, Centre for Mathematical Morphology, MINES ParisTech, PSL Research University
Dr. Decenciere is a senior researcher at MINES ParisTech. His current research interests focus on image segmentation using mathematical morphology and deep learning, with applications in retinal imaging, histology and astronomy, among others. Bridging the gap between theory and practice is one of his main motivations. Most of his research is financed by industrial partners. Since 2008 he has been in charge of a collaboration with L Oreal dealing with the characterization of human skin through different imaging modalities such as multiphoton microscopy, whole slide imaging and structured light 3D scanning. The resulting software is routinely used by L Oreal.
Stefan Hoops
Research Associate Professor, Network, System Science and Advanced Computing, University of Virginia
Stefan Hoops is a Research Associate Professor in the Network, System Science and Advanced Computing (NSSAC) division at the Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative at the University of Virginia. Before joining the institute in 2018, Dr. Hoops worked at the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech from 2000 to 2018 and served as a software designer and developer for Schumann Consulting Corporation in Germany from 1995 to 2000. Dr. Hoops is a coleader of the COPASI project, a software application for simulation and analysis of biochemical networks and their dynamics that supports models in the SBML standard and simulations using ODEs or the Gillespie stochastic simulation algorithm. He was elected in 2006 as one of the five editors of the Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML), serving from 2007 to 2009, and continues to be engaged in standards development for the life science community. A further interest is the integration of computational modeling and immunology experimentation to characterize the immunoregulatory mechanisms underlying immune responses to enteric pathogens.
Rodrigo Mora
Associate Professor, Faculty of Microbiology, University of Costa Rica
Rodrigo Mora conducted his PhD studies in the field of Programmed Cell Death in Cancer at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ, Heidelberg) and his first postdoctoral training in Systems Biology at the Bioquant Center at the University of Heidelberg. Currently he holds the position of Associate Professor within the Faculty of Microbiology and the Masters Program in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology at the University of Costa Rica. Over the past five years he has established his own research group, Systems Biology of Personalized Therapy, and has supervised several PhD, Masters and undergraduate students in both biological and computational fields. His research interests include the systems biology of personalised cancer treatment. His team is currently performing an in vitro test of chemosensitivity on tumors of breast cancer patients. The remaining tumor material is used for sequencing studies looking for genomic and transcriptomic markers of resistance or sensitivity to chemotherapy, and for other basic research on cancer biology, especially the role of miRNA and lncRNAs. His team is also developing molecular sensors, including ones to detect chemotherapy resistance at the single cell level based on sphingolipid metabolism and autophagy, and studying Dengue virus pathogenesis and Dengue virus induced cellular alterations.
Verónica Melesse Vergara
HPC Engineer, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Veronica G. Vergara Larrea is originally from Quito, Ecuador. Veronica earned a B.A. in Mathematics and Physics at Reed College and an M.S. in Computational Science at Florida State University. She has eight years of experience in the high performance computing field and is currently working as an HPC Engineer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. In addition to providing assistance to OLCF users, Veronica is part of the systems testing team and led acceptance for Summit, the next generation supercomputer at ORNL. Her research interests include high performance computing, large scale system testing, and performance evaluation and optimization of scientific applications. Veronica is a member of both IEEE and ACM and serves on the ACM SIGHPC Executive Committee.
Industry Speakers
Industry Speakers
Albert Trill, MSc
HPC and Quantum Senior Expert, Atos
Albert Trill is from Barcelona, Spain, and holds a Master in Science in Engineering from the Polytechnical University of Catalunya. He worked as an associate professor in Algorithmics at the Higher Technical University of Engineering of Barcelona and as a researcher in Computer Graphics and Computational Geometry. He has held engineering positions in technology companies such as Apple, Oracle, Silicon Graphics and Bull. He currently serves as Senior Expert of HPC and Quantum Computing at Atos.
Joaquim Munoz Merino
HPC Leader for Latin America, Dell Technologies
Joaquim Munoz Merino has 30 years of experience in HPC. At CARLA 2019 he will give the talk Dell EMC HPC Solutions Portfolio: making innovation real with the convergence of HPC and AI.
Fabio Alves
HPC Sales Specialist for Latin America, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Fabio Alves did his bachelor in Mechanical Engineering at Instituto Maua de Tecnologia and started working with HPC at Silicon Graphics as a pre sales engineer, solution architect and account executive. He is now HPC Sales Specialist for Latin America at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. With more than 10 years of experience in the HPC market in Latin America across academic, research and commercial segments, he has worked on the design of several HPC systems installed in the region, including a system in Brazil that reached position 95 on the Top 500 list.
Jaime Puente
AI Segment Manager, Data Center Group, Lenovo USA
Jaime Puente is the artificial intelligence (AI) segment manager at Lenovo, responsible for developing and managing research collaborations with universities and business partnerships with AI independent software vendors worldwide, bridging research and industry. Prior to joining Lenovo, Jaime spent 14 years as director of academic outreach at Microsoft Research, working on strategic research initiatives in Latin America and the United States. Before Microsoft, Jaime worked for Commerce One, a pioneering e commerce company, and before that he was a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral (ESPOL) in Ecuador. Jaime was a Fulbright Scholar for his early engagement with academia. His academic background includes an M.S. in Computer Engineering from Iowa State University, an MBA and an Electronics Engineering degree from ESPOL, and an Educational Specialist post masters degree from Nova Southeastern University (NSU) in Florida. He holds a Ph.D. in Computing Technology in Education from NSU. His main research interests concern the use of artificial intelligence in academia and industry, statistical data analysis and high performance computing.