Yogesh Simmhan

Dr. Yogesh Simmhan is a Research Assistant Professor at the Electrical Engineering Department and Associate Director of the Center for Energy Informatics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. His research area is on distributed data and computing systems that spans Cloud and Distributed Computing, High Performance Computing, distributed data and metadata management, and software architectures for such large scale applications in eScience and eEngineering. His interests include workflow and dataflow programming abstractions to easily compose dynamic and distributed applications, robust execution frameworks for Clouds and heterogeneous platforms, and provenance and semantic information management in collaboratory environments. These serve the overarching goal of building scalable, resilient systems to empower dynamic, distributed and "Big Data" applications.

Simmhan's current research is on distributed and adaptive software infrastructure for the energy informatics domain, and he serves as a project manager in the Los Angeles Smart Grid Project. Simmhan has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University and was previously with Microsoft Research. He is an IEEE and an ACM member.

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Current

At the Center for Energy Informatics, I am exploring information management and scalability challenges posed by the rapid advances of cyber-physical systems like Smart Power Grids. This work, done as part of the DOE-sponsored Los Angeles Smart Grid Demonstration project, is bringing together techniques from semantic web, complex event and stream processing, and machine learning to build a scalable software architecture on a secure Cloud platform to support these next generation of eEngineering applications.

I also pursue research into scalable and resilient Cloud frameworks for dynamic, distributed and data intensive applications. I am investigating programming frameworks and data layout strategies for scaling large graph applications on Cloud infrastructure, as part of the Graph Oriented Framework for Foresight and insight using Scalable Heuristics (GoFFish) project funded by a DARPA's XDATA grant. I am also active in the data provenance community, where I serve as an invited expert in the W3C Provenance Working Group.

I work closely with Prof. Viktor Prasanna. Details of our group, its research and our members can be found at our wiki.

Prior

Microsoft Research

Earlier, I was a postdoc at the eScience Group at Microsoft Research, working with Catharine van Ingen. I contributed to the Pan-STARRS, Trident Scientific Workflow Workbench and Azure Generic Worker projects. I collaborated closely with Alex Szalay on Pan-STARRS, Roger Barga on Trident, and David Heckerman on genome analysis on Azure.

Indiana University

I graduated from Indiana University with an M.S. and Ph.D. from the Computer Science Department, advised by Prof. Beth Plale and Prof. Dennis Gannon. I worked on grid and web services, distributed data management and scientific workflows as part of the NSF Large-ITR LEAD Project. I initiated the Karma Provenance project as part of my dissertation, which was awarded an NSF SDCI grant for further development.

• IEEE SCALE Challenge. First Place. Adaptive Energy Forecasting and Information Diffusion for Smart Power Grids, Simmhan, et al. (2012)
• Microsoft Ship-It Award. Microsoft Trident Scientific Workflow Workbench, Barga, et al. (2009)
• IEEE/ACM Supercomputing HPC Storage Challenge. First Place. GrayWulf: Scalable Cluster Architecture for Data Intensive Computing, Szalay, et al. (2008)

Student Mentorship

Current

1. Saima Aman Ph.D. Student, University of Southern California (2010 - Present)
2. Hsuan-Yi Chu Ph.D. Student, University of Southern California (2012 - Present)
3. Alok Kumbhare Ph.D. Student, University of Southern California (2010 - Present)
4. Mark Redekopp Ph.D. Student, University of Southern California (2011 - Present)
5. Charith W. Ph.D. Student, University of Southern California (2012 - Present)
6. Qunzhi Zhou Ph.D. Student, University of Southern California (2010 - Present)
7. Rongyang Liu M.S. Student, University of Southern California (2012 - Present)
8. Soonil Nagarkar M.S. Student, University of Southern California (2013 - Present)
9. Usman Noor M.S. Student, University of Southern California (2013 - Present)
10. Santosh Sathyavijayanagaram Ravi M.S. Student, University of Southern California (2013 - Present)
11. Samuel Stevens M.S. Student, University of Southern California (2012 - Present)
12. Kenneth Barry B.S. Student, University of Southern California (2012 - Present)
13. Zachary Gima B.S. Student, University of Southern California (2012 - Present)

Prior

• Litao Den M.S. Student, University of Southern California (2011 - 2012)
• Srivathsan Rajagopalan M.S. Student, University of Southern California (2012)
• Ashwath Rajan B.S., University of Southern California (2012)
• Vaibhav Agarwal M.S. Student, University of Southern California (2012)
• Jing Zhao Ph.D. Student, University of Southern California (2010 - 2012)
• Sreedhar Natarajan M.S., University of Southern California (2011 - 2012) ... @Amazon
• Nikhil Rajguru M.S., University of Southern California (2012 - 2012) ... @Cisco
• Ian Robinson M.S., University of Southern California (2011 - 2012) ... @EnerNOC
• Wei Yin M.S., University of Southern California (2011 - 2012) ... @American Express
• Baohua Cao Ph.D. Student, University of Southern California (2010 - 2011)
• Michail Giakkoupis M.S., University of Southern California (2010 - 2011)
• Emad Soroush Intern, eScience Group, Microsoft Research/Ph.D. Student, University of Washington (Spring 2010)
• Girish Subramanian Intern, eScience Group, Microsoft Research/M.S., Indiana University (Summer 2009) ... @Microsoft

Recent Professional Service

• Workshop Co-Chair IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC), Co-located with HiPC (2013)
• General Co-Chair Workshop on Scientific Cloud Computing (ScienceCloud), Co-located with HPDC (2012-2013)
• General Co-Chair Workshop on Massive Data Analytics on Scalable Systems (DataMASS), Co-located with HiPC (2012)
• Doctoral Symposium Co-Chair IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid) (2012-2013)
• General Co-Chair Student Research Symposium and Travel Awards, IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC) (2011-2012)
• Steering Committee Member Workshop on Workflow Models, Systems, Services and Applications in the Cloud (CloudFlow) (2012)
• Guest Editor Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience Journal (CPE) — Special Issue on Cloud Computing for Data-driven Science and Engineering (2012)
• Guest Editor International Journal of Computers and Their Applications — Special Issue on Scientific Workflows, Provenance and Their Applications (Volume 18, Issue 3, September 2011)
• Guest Editor Future Generation Computer Systems — Special Issue on Using the Open Provenance Model to Address Interoperability Challenges (Volume 27, Issue 6, June 2011)
• Program Committee Member IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid) (2012)
• Program Committee Member Workshop on Scalable Workflow Enactment Engines and Technologies (SWEET) (2012)
• Program Committee Member Workshop on Scientific Workflows (SWF) (2012)
• Invited Expert W3C Provenance Working Group (2011 - Present)
• Manuscript Reviewer IEEE T-PDS, T-KDE, T-SC, T-SE, T-ASE, IC; Elseiver FGCS, JSS; Springer JCST, JGC; Wiley CPE; Inderscience IJBPIM

Recent Publications (2012 — present)

1. Saima Aman, Yogesh Simmhan and Viktor K. Prasanna, Energy Management Systems: State of the Art and Emerging Trends , IEEE Communications Magazine , 51 (1) , 2013 , pp. 114 - 119 , IEEE. ([IF 3.785])
2. Mark Redekopp, Yogesh Simmhan, Litao Deng and Viktor K. Prasanna, Optimizations and Analysis of BSP Graph Processing Models on Public Clouds , International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) , 2013 , IEEE. ((To Appear) [CORE A])
3. Yogesh Simmhan, Saima Aman, Alok Kumbhare, Rongyang Liu, Sam Stevens, Qunzhi Zhou and Viktor Prasanna, Cloud-based Software Platform for Data-Driven Smart Grid Management , Computing in Science and Engineering , July/August , 2013 , pp. 1-11 , IEEE and AIP. ((To Appear) [IF 1.422, CORE C])
4. Alok Kumbhare, Yogesh Simmhan and Viktor Prasanna, Cryptonite: A Secure and Performant Data Repository on Public Clouds , International Cloud Computing Conference (CLOUD) , 2012 , pp. 510-517 ([CORE B])
5. Yogesh Simmhan, Litao Den, Alok Kumbhare, Mark Redekopp and Viktor Prasanna, Scalable, Secure Analysis of Social Sciences Data on the Azure Platform , Cloud Futures Workshop , 2012
6. Yogesh Simmhan, Vaibhav Agarwal, Saima Aman, Alok Kumbhare, Sreedhar Natarajan, Nikhil Rajguru, Ian Robinson, Samuel Stevens, Wei Yin, Qunzhi Zhou and Viktor Prasanna, Adaptive Energy Forecasting and Information Diffusion for Smart Power Grids , IEEE International Scalable Computing Challenge (SCALE) , 2012 , pp. 1-4 (First Prize)
7. Yogesh Simmhan, Gabriel Antoniu, Carole Goble and Lavanya Ramakrishnan, Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Scientific Cloud Computing (ScienceCloud) , , 2012 , ACM.
8. Wei Yin, Yogesh Simmhan and Viktor Prasanna, Scalable Regression Tree Learning on Hadoop using OpenPlanet , International Workshop on MapReduce and its Applications (MAPREDUCE) , 2012 , pp. 57-64
9. Jing Zhao, Yogesh Simmhan and Viktor Prasanna, Presenting Apropos Provenance for Situation Awareness and Forensics , International Proveanance and Annotation Workshop , 7525 , 2012 , pp. 250-253 , Springer. (Poster)
10. Qunzhi Zhao, Yogesh Simmhan and Viktor K. Prasanna, Incorporating Semantic Knowledge into Stream Processing for Smart Grid Applications , International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) , 2012 , pp. 1-16 ([CORE B])
11. Qunzhi Zhou, Sreedhar Natarajan, Yogesh Simmhan and Viktor Prasanna, Semantic Information Modeling for Emerging Applications in Smart Grid , International Conference on Information Technology : New Generations (ITNG) , 2012 , pp. 775-782
12. Qunzhi Zhou, Yogesh Simmhan and Viktor Prasanna, SCEPter: Semantic Complex Event Processing over End-to-End Data Flows , (12-926) , 2012 , Computer Science Department, University of Southern California.
13. Qunzhi Zhao, Yogesh Simmhan and Viktor K. Prasanna, On Using Semantic Complex Event Processing for Dynamic Demand Response Optimization , , 2012 , USC Computer Science Department.

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