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The new Frontiers in Computing Systems group,  part of Columbia’s Data Science Institute, is hosting an inaugural full-day symposium, with leading speakers and panelists, to highlight the advances and grand challenges in Big Data infrastructure:  extreme-scale computing systems (hardware, parallel computing, software, databases) and their application to solve diverse cutting-edge problems in climate and ocean science, population-scale biomedical informatics, genomics, materials science, neuroscience, astrophysics and engineering.

The symposium includes an exciting keynote by Ruchir Puri, the chief architect of IBM’s Watson system, on "Engineering the Future of Cognitive Systems."  Other speakers include those developing state-of-art high-performance parallel computers and large-scale Python-based software platforms, as well as experts on computational problems in climate science, astrophysics, and protein folding simulation.

The event will include a keynote talk, lunch, two talk presentation sessions, a networking and poster session, and a panel of experts with audience participation.

 

avatar for Leslie Greengard

Leslie Greengard

Professor, Courant Institute, NYU
Director, Center for Computational Biology, Simons Foundation (Flatiron Institute)

LESLIE GREENGARD is the Director of the Center for Computational Biology at the Flatiron Institute, a division of the Simons Foundation. He received his B.A. degree in Mathematics from Wesleyan University (1979), and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and M.D. degree from Yale University (1987).  From 1987-1989, he was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University and at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYU, where he is presently a member of the faculty. He served as the Director of the Courant Institute from 2006-2011.

Greengard and collaborators developed the Fast Multipole Method (FMM) for particle simulations and electromagnetic modeling, the fast Gauss transform for the analysis of diffusion and heat flow, and high order accurate methods for a variety of wave propagation problems. Much of his research has been aimed at the development of integral equation based methods for partial differential equations that are geometrically flexible, robust and automatic. For their work on the FMM, he and Vladimir Rokhlin received the Steele Prize from the American Mathematical Society in 2001. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering (2006) and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2016).