Publish Date: 03/26/2009

Naren Ramakrishnan, Professor and Associate Head in the Computer Science department at Virginia Tech, was invited to serve on the organizing committee for the 2009 US Frontiers of Engineering (US FOE) Symposium, which will be held at the National Academies' Beckman Center in Irvine, California, on September 10-12, 2009.  

The annual event, sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), brings together outstanding engineers ages 30 to 45 who are performing exceptional engineering research and technical work in a variety of disciplines. Other than the organizers and speakers, about 100 participants are selected through a competitive two-stage process, from academia, industry, and government, so being selected to participate is itself considered an honor.

Along with J. Christopher Love of MIT, Ramakrishnan is organizing a session on “Engineering Tools for Scientific Discovery” for this year’s symposium. Speakers in this session will present the latest advances in engineering, instrumentation, and computational modeling that are leading to major scientific advances. Speaking about the session, Ramakrishnan said “New technologies are often the foundation on which major scientific discoveries are made. Previously ‘technologies’ used to mean primarily physical instrumentation but now computational methods and algorithms are key to simulation and integrating knowledge gained from data. The session will highlight a number of futuristic technologies, spanning a range of scales, from molecular biology to oceanic systems.” Other sessions planned at the symposium deal with Resilient and Sustainable Infrastructures, Engineering the Health Care Delivery System, and Nano/Micro Photonics and New Applications.

Ramakrishnan said the primary advantage of this type of meeting is to bring together a diverse cross-section of people who might not otherwise meet in a single forum. “It is a great networking opportunity. Everybody is an expert in their respective field and you might find overlaps and connections between your work and theirs.”

Naren Ramakrishnan joined Virginia Tech in Aug 1998 as an assistant professor after receiving his Ph.D. in computer sciences from Purdue University. His research interests include computational science, especially computational biology, data mining, and information personalization. He has received an NSF CAREER grant, the New Century Technology Council Innovation award, and was named to Computerworld’s list of “40 under 40” innovative IT people to watch (2007). He serves on the editorial board of IEEE Computer and was a general chair of the recently concluded Eighth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM'08) held in Pisa, Italy, Dec 2008.

NAE's annual Frontiers of Engineering symposia were started in 1995 to bring outstanding younger engineers (ages 30-40/45) from different disciplines together to discuss leading-edge engineering research and technical work in order to foster the transfer of new techniques and approaches across fields, facilitate collaborative work, and establish ongoing contacts among the next generation of engineering leaders. For more information, please see the FOE website at www.nae.edu/frontiers.