Profiles

George K. Thiruvathukal is Full Professor of Computer Science and the Department Chairperson at Loyola University Chicago. He is also Visiting Computer Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory in the Leadership Computing Facility.  He received a Ph.D. (1995) and MS (1990) in Computer Science from Illinois Institute of Technology and a BA (1988) in Computer Science and Physics with a Mathematics Minor from Lewis University in Romeoville, IL.

As a Computer Science major at Lewis University, he received the department’s top graduating student award in the College of Arts and Sciences; as a Physics major at the same university, he was inducted into the Sigma Pi Sigma Physics National honor society. During the summer of his junior year, he worked with Philip J. Hatcher at the University of New Hampshire on a NSF-funded summer REU program focused on compiler construction for data-parallel languages on genearl-purpose MIMD architectures, where he really learned C and Unix systems programming and continues to teach on these topics to this day in courses such as COMP 141, 310-410, and 339-439 (among others). The resulting tools led to the development of a portable Data Parallel C dialect inspired by the C* Language used to program the Connection Machine. The ideas of Data Parallel C live on in Data Parallel C++, an Intel effort where Dr. Thiruvathukal is developing curricular modules to bring this promising new technology to new audiences.

Dr. Thiruvathukal's doctoral research focused on higher-level approaches to concurrent, parallel, and distributed programming with an emphasis on models, languages, libraries, middleware, tools, and software engineering techniques. The culmination of this research was a book in Sun Microsystems Press and the development of a class library, which was cited as prior art and related work in JSR-166, Concurrency Utilities (a.k.a. java.util.concurrent).

Simultaneously with his doctoral studies, Dr. Thiruvathukal worked in the computing and engineering industry from 1989-1996 at Tellabs, R.R. Donnelley and Sons, and Metromail (now Experian) and as an independent consultant. Upon completing his PhD in 1995, he was a postdoctoral computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, where he worked with Ian Foster et al on grid computing and getting messaging middleware (Message Passing Interface) to work on the first version of Globus.

His current work addresses software engineering for scienctific software (research software) and machine learning, low-power computer vision, computational neuroscience, human-centered computation, and interdisciplinary thinking. Recent interdisciplinary interests and work include geneal information technology; ethical, legal, and social issues in computing; entrepreneurship; and broadening participation in computing. See the Software and Systems Laboratory for more details.

Dr. Thiruvathukal's work is and has been support by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition, he he has received gifts from many companies, including Google, Google Research, Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, and Hostway Corporation.