George K. Thiruvathukal, PhD
Full Professor and Chairperson, Department of Computer Science and Visiting Computer Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory
Director, Software and Systems Laboratory at Loyola University Chicago
Visiting Computer Scientist, Argonne National Laboratory
Affiliated Faculty, Purdue University HELPS Lab
Track Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Open Source Software
Advisory Board, IEEE Computer
Bio
Hi! I’m George. I am full professor of computer science and chairperson of same at Loyola University Chicago and visiting computer scientist (guest faculty/researcher) at Argonne National Laboratory.
I double-majored in computer science and physics and minored (almost majored) in mathematics at Lewis University in Romeoville, IL. I earned a PhD in computer science from the Illinois Institute of Technology under the supervision of Thomas W. Christopher. My doctoral work involved the creation of messaging middleware to support parallel and distributed computation on computing clusters and networks of workstations (mostly in C/C++ and Java).
My research and teaching interests include high-performance computing and distributed systems, programming languages, software engineering, machine learning. I am also interested in the interdisciplinary computing and work in computational science, data science, and digital humanities and arts (music). My recent body of work is primarily in the areas of energy-efficient computer vision and empirical software engineering. My research been funded by government agencies, including NSF, DARPA, NSA, and NEH. I have also received research- and education-related gifts from industry, including Intel, Google, Meta, and Microsoft.
My academic career can be described as a bit non-linear. From 1990-1997, I worked full-time and consulting positions in the industry and ended this early phase of my career as a senior member of technical staff and development manager. I credit this experience for helping to develop the leadership and “office” skills required of a department chairperson.
At Loyola, I have served as undergraduate program director (in 2004) and as graduate program director (from 2004-2006). Apart from my university service, I have been an editor-in-chief (EIC) of IEEE Computing in Science and Engineering Magazine (from 2013-2016) and Associate EIC of IEEE Computer (from 2016-2019) and chaired the Magazine Operations Committee (from 2017-2018) after my EIC service. I have also served on the Publications Board, which oversees the transactions and magazines published by the IEEE Computer Society.
I am presently serving as a member of the IEEE Computer Advisory Board and as a Track EIC for the Journal of Open Source Software (Data Science and Artificial Intelligence track).
Apart from being a department chair and professor, I returned to school in January 2023 to study jazz piano performance with Lara Driscoll, a talented French-American pianist and teacher. (She is my first actual piano teacher!) I have also studied jazz informally in the ensembles program at the Old Town School, including Michael Nearpass and Jack Cassidy (and hope to be back there soon).
Hobbies
- classical, ragtime, and jazz piano
- biking, running, walking, and basic core training
- cooking and dining
- reading and writing
- political science
Interests
- High-Performance and Distributed Computing
- Software Engineering
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
- Computer Systems and Operating Systems
- Computer Vision
- Cyber-Physical Systems
- Data Science and Data Engineering
- Programming Languages
- Computational Science
- Data Science
- Digital Humanities
- Digital Music
- Human-Centered Design
- Computer Science and Engineering Education
- Broadening Participation in Computing
- Leadership
- Collaboration and Teamwork
- Social Justice
- Entrepreneurship
Education
PhD in Computer Science, 1995
Illinois Institute of Technology
MS in Computer Science, 1990
Illinois Institute of Technology
BS in Computer Science, 1988
Lewis University (Illinois)
BS in Physics, 1988
Lewis University (Illinois)
High School Diploma, 1985
Decatur High School and Highline Community College (Washington State) and Joliet Junior College (Illinois)
Teaching
Fall 2022
No scheduled teaching.
Spring 2023
- COMP 339/439: Distributed Systems
- Monday 4:15pm-6:45pm US Central/Chicago
- Distributed Systems lecture notes at ds.cs.luc.edu
- Advanced Systems Programming/Operating Systems notes at os.cs.luc.edu
Past Courses
To appear soon.
Code examples
*Research
Current Projects and Funding
UnoAPI: Curricular modules for high-performance computing using data-parallel C++ with Intel’s OneAPI (PI)
NSF OAC-2104319 Cyber Infrastructure to Enable Computer Vision Applications at the Edge Using Automated Contextual Analysis (PI)
NSF OAC-2107020 Advancing Low-Power Computer Vision at the Edge (PI)
NSF HRD-2121654, Senior Personnel, ADVANCE Adaptation: INSPIRED-Inclusive Practices in the Retention and Equity of Diverse Faculty, $972,496, 2021-2024
NCAE-C H98230-22-1-0306, Taming Container Privileges using Userland OS Guests, $500,000 (co-PI)
Funding History
- NSF DMS-1812124, Co-PI, Collaborative Research: Statistical Analysis of Partially Observed Shapes in Two Dimensions, $75,028, 2018-2019
- NSF CNS-1738691, Co-PI, Collaborative Research: Chicago Alliance for Equity in Computer Science, $72,497, 2017-2021
- NSF OAC-2027524, Senior Personnel, Leveraging New Data Sources to Analyze the Risk of COVID-19 in Crowded Locations, $58,000.
- NSF OAC-1445347, PI, EAGER: Collaborative Research: Making Software Engineering Work for Computational Science and Engineering: An Integrated Approach, $109,598, 2014-2018
- NSF CCF-0444197, PI, Collaborative Proposal: Ultra-Scalable System Software and Tools for Data-Intensive Computing, $72,433, 2004-2007
- NSF CNS-0205652, PI, ITR: The Community Information Technology Entrepreneurship Project, $1,034,500, 2002-2006
- NSF CNS-1042337, PI, Collaborative Research: BPC-LSA: ACM SIGBP: Forming an ACM Special Interest Group to Scale the Impact of BPC Activities, $38,782, 2010-2014
- NEH HD-50782-09, co-PI, Humanities Research Infrastructure and Tools (HRIT): An Environment for Collaborative Textual Scholarship, $50,000, 2009-2010
- NSF CNS-0837769, Co-PI, Improving Metropolitan Participation to Accelerate Computing Throughput and Success (IMPACTS), $141,711, 2008-2009
- NSF DBI-0552888, Co-PI, REU Site: Integrated Cross-Disciplinary Summer Program in Bioinformatics, $292,412, 2006-2010
- NSF OAC-0228926, Co-PI, HPNC: HPNC for Science Research at Loyola University Chicago, $150,000, 2002-2005
- DARPA SBIR Phase I, PI, Ad Hoc Human Interaction Networks for Asymmetric Threat Surveillance, $100,000, 2002
- DARPA SBIR Phase I, Co-PI, Cluster Based Repositories and Analysis, $100,000, 2003
Corporate
- Intel, PI, Expanding OS + DS lectures to include oneAPI/DPC++, $$40,000, 2022
- Google, PI, TensorFlow Models Garden Software Engineering, $30,000, 2021
- Facebook, PI, Low-Power Computer Vision Competition, $30,000, 2021
- Google, Co-PI, Google Research Awards: Machine Perception, $75,000, 2017
- 4C Insights, PI, Unrestricted gift to supportt systems research at Loyola, $10,000, 2017
- Typesafe, Co-PI, Unrestricted gift to support languages/systems research at Loyola, $5,000, 2015
- Microsoft, PI, Unrestricted gift to support HPC and Bioinformatics Research, $15,000, 2009
- Microsoft, PI, In-kind equipment donation of computational cluster (80 nodes), $100,000, 2009
- HP, Co-PI, Learning the Wonders of Computing with Wireless Collaboration, $68,000, 2007
- Hostway Corporation, PI, Unrestricted gift to support creation of open source laboratory, $30,000, 2007}
Publications
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(2022).
Are You Really Muted?: A Privacy Analysis of Mute Buttons in Video Conferencing Apps.
Proceedings of 22nd Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2022).
(2022).
Directed Acyclic Graph-Based Neural Networks for Tunable Low-Power Computer Vision.
Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design.
(2022).
Efficient Computer Vision for Embedded Systems.
Computer.
(2022).
Efficient Computer Vision on Edge Devices with Pipeline-Parallel Hierarchical Neural Networks.
27th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC).
(2022).
Establishing Trust in Vehicle-to-Vehicle Coordination: A Sensor Fusion Approach.
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications.
(2022).
Irrelevant Pixels are Everywhere: Find and Exclude Them for More Efficient Computer Vision.
2022 IEEE 4th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Circuits and Systems (AICAS).
(2022).
Low-Power Computer Vision: Improve the Efficiency of Artificial Intelligence.
Chapman and Hall/CRC Press.
(2022).
Tree-based Unidirectional Neural Networks for Low-Power Computer Vision.
IEEE Design and Test.
(2022).
Why Accuracy Is Not Enough: The Need for Consistency in Object Detection.
IEEE MultiMedia.
(2021).
Moonshine: An Online Randomness Distiller for Zero-Involvement Authentication.
Information Processing in Sensor Networks 2021 (IPSN 2021).
(2021).
Shape-Based Classification of Partially Observed Curves, With Applications to Anthropology.
Frontiers in Applied Mathematics and Statistics.
(2020).
Camera Placement Meeting Restrictions of Computer Vision.
2020 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP).
(2020).
A Real-Time Feature Indexing System on Live Video Streams.
2020 IEEE 44th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC).
(2020).
A Survey of Methods for Low-Power Deep Learning and Computer Vision.
2020 IEEE 6th World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT).
(2020).
FLIC: A Distributed Fog Cache for City-Scale Applications.
2020 IEEE International Conference on Fog Computing (ICFC).
(2020).
A Computational Theory for the Emergence of Grammatical Categories in Cortical Dynamics.
Frontiers in Neural Circuits.
(2020).
Addressing Rogue Vehicles by Integrating Computer Vision, Activity Monitoring, and Contextual Information.
12th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications.
(2020).
Crowdsourcing Detection of Sampling Biases in Image Datasets.
Proceedings of The Web Conference 2020.
(2020).
Low-Power Object Counting with Hierarchical Neural Networks.
Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design.
(2020).
Toward a containerized pipeline for longitudinal analysis of open-source software projects.
Graduate Research Symposium 2020.
(2020).
Towards High-End Scalability on Biologically-Inspired Computational ModelsAuthors.
Parallel Computing: Technology Trends.
(2020).
VoltKey: Using Power Line Noise for Zero-Involvement Pairing and Authentication (Demo Abstract).
(2019).
Exercises Integrating High School Mathematics with Robot Motion Planning.
2019 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE).
(2019).
See the World Through Network Cameras.
Computer.
(2019).
An Analysis of the Effect of Tooth Wear on Bovid Identification.
South African Journal of Science.
(2019).
Cloud Resource Optimization for Processing Multiple Streams of Visual Data.
IEEE MultiMedia.
(2019).
Low-Power Computer Vision: Status, Challenges, and Opportunities.
IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems.
(2019).
Phonetic Acquisition in Cortical Dynamics, a Computational Approach.
PLOS ONE.
(2019).
Large-Scale Object Detection of Images from Network Cameras in Variable Ambient Lighting Conditions.
2019 IEEE Conference on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval (MIPR).
(2019).
Integrating Mathematics and Educational Robotics: Simple Motion Planning.
10th International Conference on Robotics in Education (RiE).
(2019).
Tests as Maintainable Assets via Auto-Generated Spies: A Case Study Involving the Scala Collections Library's Iterator Trait.
Proceedings of the Tenth ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Scala.
(2019).
Use of Software Process in Research Software Development: A Survey.
Proceedings of the Evaluation and Assessment on Software Engineering (EASE) 2019.
(2018).
A Survey of Software Metric Use in Research Software Development.
2018 IEEE 14th International Conference on e-Science (e-Science).
(2018).
Cross-Referencing Social Media and Public Surveillance Camera Data for Disaster Response.
IEEE Symposium on Technologies for Homeland Security.
(2018).
Analyzing Real-Time Multimedia Content from Network Cameras Using CPUs and GPUs in the Cloud.
2018 IEEE Conference on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval (MIPR).
(2018).
2018 Low-Power Image Recognition Challenge: Status, Challenegs, Opportunities.
arXiv:1810.01732.
(2018).
A Comparison of Machine Learning Techniques for Taxonomic Classification of Teeth from the Family Bovidae.
Journal of Applied Statistics.
(2018).
Analyzing Real-Time Multimedia Content From Network Cameras Using CPUs and GPUs in the Cloud.
IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval.
(2018).
Former CiSE EICs Reflect on the Magazines 20th Anniversary.
Computing in Science Engineering.
(2018).
Woolf Online.
(2017).
A Distributed Graph Approach for Pre-processing Linked RDF Data Using Supercomputers.
Workshop on Semantic Big Data (SBD 2018) at ACM SIGMOD.
(2017).
Comparison of Visual Datasets for Machine Learning.
IEEE Conference on Information Reuse and Integration 2017.
(2017).
Computer Science and Cultural History: A Dialogue.
CESTEMER Conference: Cultivating Ensembles in STEM Education and Research.
(2017).
Examining the Use of Amazon's Mechanical Turk for Edge Extraction of the Occlusal Surface of Fossilized Bovid Teeth..
PLOS ONE.
(2017).
Reproducible Research for Computing in Science & Engineering.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2017).
Software Engineering for Science.
Taylor & Francis/CRC Press.
(2017).
The Graph Database: Jack of All Trades or Just Not SQL?.
IT Professional.
(2016).
A Polyglot Approach to Bioinformatics Data Integration: A Phylogenetic Analysis of HIV-1.
Evolutionary Bioinformatics.
(2016).
Best of RESPECT, Part 2.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2016).
Beyond Pythagoras.
EdTech Digest.
(2016).
How AI Is Bringing Hollywood to Life.
VentureBeat.
(2016).
Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT) RESPECT 2016.
IEEE.
(2016).
The Need for Research in Broadening Participation.
Communications of the ACM.
(2015).
A Framework Architecture for Student Learning in Distributed Embedded Systems.
10th IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Embedded Systems (SIES).
(2015).
Cloudy with a Chance of Sunshine, or the Future of Magazine Publishing (Article, 2015) [WorldCat.Org].
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2015).
Proceedings of 2015 Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT) RESPECT 2015.
Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT) RESPECT 2015.
(2015).
Quantitative Morphological Analysis of Bovid Teeth Using Elliptical Fourier Function Analyses.
(2015).
Scientific Software Communities.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2015).
The All-Digital Future and Digital CiSE.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2015).
The Next Generation of Computational Science and Engineering.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2014).
Extreme Data [Guest Editors' Introduction].
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2014).
Single Page Apps for Humanists: A Case Study Using the Perseus Richmond Times Corpus.
Proceedings of Digital Humanities 2014 (DH2014).
(2014).
What We Publish in CiSE.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2013).
Cloud Computing [Guest Editors' Introduction].
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2013).
Computational Science, Demystified - the Future, Revealed and CiSE, 2013.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2013).
Productivity in the Cognitive Overload Era.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2013).
Software Engineering Need not be Difficult.
WSSSPE 2013.
(2013).
What's in an Algorithm?.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2013).
Who Needs Tablets? We Do.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2012).
Accelerating Learning with Distance Education and Open Courseware.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2012).
Codename Revolution: The Nintendo WII Platform (Platform Studies).
MIT Press.
(2012).
Digging into Data.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2012).
Innovation Mashups: Academic Rigor Meets Social Networking Buzz.
Computer.
(2012).
Simplifying Domain Modeling and Memory Management in User-Mode Filesystems with the NOFS Framework.
International Conference on Electro Information Technology 2012.
(2011).
Beyond CiSE and Back to the Future.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2011).
Books [reviews of \"Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly-Connected World; Easley, D. and Kleinberg, J.; 2010 and \"Introduction to High Performance Computing for Scientists and Engineers\"; Hager, G. and Wellein, G.; 2011)].
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2011).
Moving Academic Department Functions to Social Networks and Clouds: Initial Experiences.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2011).
RestFS: Resources are Filesystems, too.
Second International Workshop / RESTful Design (WS-REST ‘11).
(2011).
RestFS: The Filesystem as a Connector Abstraction for Flexible Resource and Service Composition.
Cloud Computing: Methodology, System, and Applications.
(2011).
The Object of Platform Studies: Relational Materialities and the Social Platform (the Case of the Nintendo Wii).
Digital Humanities 2011 (DH2011).
(2010).
E-Carrel: An Environment for Collaborative Textual Scholarship.
The University of Chicago.
(2010).
Online Layered File System (OLFS): A layered and versioned filesystem and performance analysis.
IEEE International Conference on Electro/Information Technology (EIT 2010).
(2010).
Virtualization for Computational Scientists.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2010).
Your Local Cloud-Enabled Library.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2009).
Computational Thinking ... and Doing.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2009).
Essential Tools: Version Control Systems.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2009).
Introducing Computing Now.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2009).
Putting a Slug to Work.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2009).
Scientific Programming: The Promises of Typed, Pure, and Lazy Functional Programming: Part II.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2008).
A Virtual Computing Laboratory.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2008).
High Performance Computing Applications on Novel Architectures.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2008).
If We Build It, Will They Come?.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2008).
Taming XML: Objects First, Then Markup.
IEEE International Conference on Electro/Information Technology (EIT 2008).
(2008).
What I Did on My Summer Vacation.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2007).
A Hike through a Post-EJB J2EE Web Application Architecture, Part III.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2007).
Project Hosting: Expanding the Scientific Programmer's Toolbox.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2006).
Electronic Editing of Anglo-Saxon Texts.
Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science.
(2006).
Scalable Approaches for Supporting MPI-IO Atomicity.
Sixth IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid, 2006. CCGRID 06.
(2006).
Home Networking.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2006).
The Hydra Filesystem: A Distrbuted Storage Famework.
Linux Clusters International.
(2006).
Unit Testing Considered Useful.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2005).
Cluster Computing.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2004).
Gentoo Linux: The next Generation of Linux.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2004).
Natural XML for Data Binding, Processing, and Persistence.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2004).
Plone and Content Management.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2004).
XML and Computational Science.
Computing in Science and Engineering.
(2003).
Scalable Implementations of MPI Atomicity for Concurrent Overlapping I/O.
International Conference on Parallel Processing.
(2002).
Web Programming: Techniques for Integrating Python, Linux, Apache, and MySQL.
Prentice Hall.
(2000).
A Java Graphical User Interface for Large-scale Scientific Computations in Distributed Systems.
Fourth International Conference on High-Performance Computing in the Asia-Pacific Region.
(2000).
A Novel Application Development Environment for Large-scale Scientific Computations.
Proceedings of the International Conference on Supercomputing.
(2000).
High Performance Java Computing: Multi-Threaded and Networked Programming.
Prentice Hall PTR and Sun Microsystems Press.
(2000).
Java on Networks of Workstations (JavaNOW): A Parallel Computing Framework Inspired by Linda and the Message Passing Interface (MPI).
Concurrency: Practice and Experience.
(2000).
Making Large-Scale Telemedicine Work: A Computational Infrastructure for Telemedicine..
Future Generation Computing Systems (Elsevier).
(1998).
A Computational Framework for Telemedicine.
Future Generation Computer Systems Future Generation Computer Systems.
(1998).
Reflective Remote Method Invocation.
Concurrency: Practice and Experience.
(1998).
Wide-Area Implementation of the Message Passing Interface.
Journal of Parallel Computing.
(1997).
Distributed Memo: Heterogeneously Concurrent Programming with a Shared Directory of Unordered Queues.
International Journal of Computers and Applications.
(1997).
Technologies for Ubiquitous Supercomputing: A Java Interface to the Nexus Communication System.
Concurrency: Practice and Experience.
(1995).
An Enhanced Actors Model and Programming Environment for Parallel and Distributed Processing.
(1994).
Toward Scalable Parallel Software: An Active Object Model and Library to Support von Neumann Languages.
International Conference on High-Performance Computing (IEEE HiPC) India.
(1994).
A Generic Software Modeling Framework for Building Heterogeneous Distributed and Parallel Software Systems.
International Conference on Advanced Science and Technology (ICAST 1994 at AT&T Bell Laboratories).
(1994).
Distributed Memo: A Heterogeneously Distributed and Parallel Software Development Environment.
International Conference on Parallel Processing.
(1994).
Distributed Memo: A Heterogeneously Parallel and Distributed Software Programming Environment.
International Conference on Parallel Processing.
(1991).
A Simulation of Demand-driven Dataflow: Translation from Lucid into MDC language.
International Parallel Processing Symposium.
Contact
- gktcs.luc.edu
- +1.773.508.8931
- 1032 W Sheridan Rd, Chicago, IL 60660-1537
- Enter Doyle Center on 1052 W Loyola Ave and GOTO 301
- by Calendly appointment only
- Book an appointment
- arXiv
- BEPress SelectedWorks
- Download CV [PDF]
- GitHub
- Google Scholar
- ORCID