News & Announcements

August 24, 2012

"Ian Foster appointed to third term as director of Computation Institute"

Ian Foster will serve a third term as director of the Computation Institute, continuing his mission to advance the study and application of computation across the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, University officials announced.

Since starting as director in 2006, Foster has overseen the expansion of Computation Institute research projects into high-impact areas such as climate change, medicine, genomics, global economics, the humanities, astronomy and particle physics. Under his supervision, Argonne and UChicago scientists affiliated with the Computation Institute continue to develop new computational tools to facilitate the growing wave of data-intensive research taking place in all areas of science.

“In the past six years under Ian’s leadership, the Computation Institute has achieved considerable success and visibility for the University and for Argonne across a number of diverse disciplines,” said Donald Levy, vice president for research and for national laboratories at UChicago, in announcing Foster’s reappointment. “I am confident that Ian will continue to identify new opportunities that have the potential for transformative impact through the use of advanced computation.”

New institute initiatives launched under Foster’s direction include computational economics, with a focus on environmental and energy economics; biomedical informatics and text mining — the analysis of text collections that has emerged as a common theme for researchers in the humanities, biomedicine, business and computer science. Computation Institute researchers have also developed new approaches and technologies in data-intensive computing, grid computing and cloud computing that enable scientists to form large-scale collaborations and make new discoveries.

“Computation is rapidly expanding the boundaries of human inquiry and knowledge, transforming the way research is conducted in virtually every discipline,” said Foster, the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor in Computer Science and the Chan Soon-Shiong Scholar, and the associate director of Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division. “In this exciting new world, the Computation Institute is poised to be a global leader in creating innovative computational methods and organizing multi-disciplinary ...

 

Continue reading: http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2012/08/24/ian-foster-appointed-third-term-director-computation-institute