Ishfaq Ahmad
Ph.D., Fellow IEEE
iahmad at cse.uta.edu
Ph: (817) 272 1526; FAX: (817) 272 3784
Dr. Ishfaq Ahmad Computer Science and Engineering Department
527 Engineering Research Building,
500 UTA Blvd, Box 19015, The University of Texas at Arlington
Arlington, TX 76019-0015, U.S.A.
A Fellow of the IEEE (class of 2008, for "contributions to scheduling techniques in parallel and distributed computing systems"), Dr. Ahmad received a BSc degree in Electrical Engineering from the
University
of Engineering and Technology,
Lahore,
Pakistan, in 1985, and an MS degree in
Computer Engineering and a PhD degree in Computer Science from Syracuse University, New York, U.S.A., in 1987 and 1992,
respectively.
Prior to that, for his secondary school education he studied at Lahore's
Govenment College,
the prestigious school that has been attended by the likes of Nobel Laureates, Dr. Abdus Salam and
Dr. Har Gobind Khorana,
the great Urdu Poet Dr. Sir. Muhammad Iqbal, and the star cricket player
Majid Khan.
His research has been in the broader areas of smart systems, parallel and distributed computing systems and their applications, optimization algorithms, multimedia systems, video compression, assistive technologies, robotics, and energy-aware sustainable computing. His research work in these areas is published nearly
275 articles in books, and peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings.
in refereed journals and conferences including
His research work in wider range of topics is
widely cited
with over 22,000 citations to his papers. One of his papers was ranked 4th among the top ten All-Time Most Cited Papers published in the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.
His well-known work also includes papers on parallel program scheduling, survey on task graph scheduling, energy-ware performance optimization, survey on video transcoding, techniques for parallelizing scheduling and video compression, techniques for rate control and motion estimation in video coding, and survey on energy-aware task scheduling and temperature-aware task scheduling on parallel and distributed computing systems. He was one of the earliest researchers who built a
software-based video phone (see picture).
He has received numerous research awards including elevation to the IEEE Fellow status and best paper awards at
Supercomputing '90 conference (New York), Supercomputing `91 conference (Albuquerque, New Mexico), and 2001 International Conference
on Parallel Processing (Spain). He also received the 2007 Best Paper Award for IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, awarded at the 2007 ISCAS conference in New Orleans,
IEEE Service Appreciation Award, and 2008 Outstanding Area Editor Award from the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology.
He joined the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department of the
University of Texas at Arlington in 2002 as full professor. He leads the Center for Advanced Computing Systems, which is committed to advancing the frontiers of computing by inventing cutting-edge systems, software, and applications.
Prior to joining UT Arlington, he was an associate professor in the Computer
Science Department at
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). At HKUST, he also
directed the
Multimedia Technology Research Center, an officially
recognized research center that he conceived and built from scratch in collaboration with Prof. Ming Liou.
The center received funding from various agencies of the Government of the Hong
Kong Special Administrative Region of China as well as local and international
industries. With more than 70 industrial partners and 40 personnel
including faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, full-time staff, and
graduate students, the center engaged in numerous R& D projects with
academia and industry from Hong Kong, China, Europe, and the U.S. The center commercialized several of
its technologies to its industrial partners world wide.
See the group picture. Prof. Ahmad holds honorary professor positions at the University of Electronic Science and Technology, Chengdu, China, (see pic) and Amity University (pic), Dubai, U.A.E, and is a senior visiting scientist at the
Institute of Computing Technology (Chinese Academy of Sciences) in Beijing, China, and the U.S. Airforce Research Lab, Rome, New York. He has also taught courses on supercomputing and parallel programming techniques to NASA engineers and scientists at the Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas. He is a certified ABET evaluator.
Dr. Ahmad's current research is funded by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Education (GAANN Project), Air Force Research Lab, Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), Adobe Inc., Texas Instruments, and Sun Microsystems.
He is leading several efforts in sustainable computing and computing for sustainability. This includes launching of a new journal with Elsevier,
Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems (SUSCOM)) of which he is the founding editor-in-chief, and launching of the
International Green Computing Conference. Currently, he is the general chair of
ICDIS..
He has served on the program committees of over 135 international conferences (including 29 in leading roles).
He served on the editorial board of
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology,
IEEE Concurrency,
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia,
IEEE Distributed Systems Online,
Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems (SUSCOM)),
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing,
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems.
He was also a guest editor of a
Special Issue of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems -- Power-Aware Parallel and Distributed Systems (PAPADS) ,
and
Special Issue of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology- Video surveillance.
Book: Handbook of Energy-Aware and Green Computing
,
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