Ahmed K.Elmagarmid: Cyber Communties - Enabling Innovation in Science and Technology

In further realization of its goal to be a place for dialogue, knowledge sharing, learning and understanding, and in continuation to the series of lectures on information and knowledge society, ISIS invited Professor. Ahmed K. Elmagarmid, director of the Cyber Center in Discovery Park and the Indiana Center for Database Systems- Purdue University, to give a lecture on Cyber Infrastructure.

The scope of Prof. Elmagarmid lecture´s was on Cyber Infrastructure as a chief enabler for innovation in many of today´s most pressing science and engineering problems. He highlighted that there are complete areas in Science, such as Systems Biology, that would not exist if not for a flourishing computing and information discipline.  In his presentation, he introduced cyber infrastructure (CI), its chief components, and the transition from being an enhancer for discovery to an enabler. He then introduced Cyber Communities as a viable way to build new CI for domain sciences, and showed through example and demonstration few existing projects in the Cyber Center at Purdue, where high performance computing, hub technologies, data analytics and visualization all come together to solve specific problems.

Professor Elmagarmid is the director of the Cyber Center in Discovery Park and the Indiana Center for Database Systems. He received a Presidential Young Investigator award from President Ronald Reagan in 1988, and distinguished alumni awards from Ohio State University and the University of Dayton in 1993 and 1995, respectively.  His research work has focused on database systems. He serves as a fellow of the CIC, a member of the Qatari Arab Joint Committee, and leads the Computing and Information Science and Engineering Initiative in Qatar Foundation. He has served the database community through conferences, journals and professional societies for the past 25 years.

To view video and presentation of the lecture, click here