~gkt

About George K. Thiruvathukal

I am a full professor of computer science at Loyola University Chicago in the CS Department, where I also serve as the department’s computing director. Since 2009, I am serving as co-director (with Steve Jones) of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities at Loyola University, where we are both working with Peter Shillingsburg on tools to enable collaborative textual scholarship (among other things). I also co-direct the CS department’s Emerging Technologies Laboratory with Konstantin Läufer, where we work on all things concurrent, parallel, embedded, and distributed–so called pervasive computing technologies.

I’m a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery. At the IEEE Computer Society, I am an associate editor in chief (AEIC) for Computing in Science and Engineering (co-published by American Institute of Physics) and Computing Now, which is the Computer Society’s foremost effort to engage its membership using new/social media. If you are a student reading my page, I encourage you to become a student member of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society. Not only is being a member of these societies valuable to your career, it helps you to maintain a commitment to lifelong learning and a connection to others in the profession.

I hold a Ph.D. from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Illinois, where I was a student from 1988-1995 (M.S. in 1990, Ph.D. in 1995). My research from the beginning of my graduate studies was about lightweight object-oriented approaches to parallel programming (using actors) and dataflow, which resulted in the development of two experimental messaging middleware systems (Distributed Memo and Enhanced Actors) to support parallel programming, mostly based on C and C++ on Unix platforms. I was a postdoctoral scientist at Argonne National Laboratory from 1996-1998, where I worked with Ian Foster on wide-area (grid) implementations of Message Passing Interface (MPI) and and interfacing then-emerging Java to the grid. While I still have an eyetoward high-performance computing through projects in novel computational approaches (scalable I/O and atomicity) and filesystems (peer-to-peer, layered/versioned, object-oriented and service-oriented filesystems), my interests span all aspects of computer science with a strong focus on software engineering. In recent years, I have been pursuing some long-dormant interdisciplinary interests. I’ve recently been involved in a fruitful collaboration with two English colleagues, Peter Shillingsburg and Steven E. Jones, in the growing area of digital humanities on tools for collaborative textual studies/scholarship and platform studies. In the latter case, Steven E. Jones and I have just completed a book, Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform, in the MIT Press Platform Studies series, edited by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost.

From 1989-1996, I was also employed in industry, both as a consultant and full-time staff member (for Tellabs, R.R. Donnelley and Sons Technical (Research) Center, and Metromail, which is now a part of Experian.

In my spare time, I enjoy reading, history (and computing history), politics, world travel, and music (piano). I enjoy spending time with Nina (my wife), Rohan (my son), and Maya (my daughter). We have our hands full but love every minute of it.

My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), DARPA, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). I’ve also received industry support from Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Hostway Corporation.

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