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Viktor K. Prasanna

Charles Lee Powell Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science

Education

  • 1978, Master's Degree, Computer Engineering, Indian Institute of Science
  • 1976, Bachelor's Degree, Electronic Engineering, Bangalore University
  • Doctoral Degree, Computer Science, Pennsylvania State University

Biography

Viktor K. Prasanna (V. K. Prasanna Kumar) is Charles Lee Powell Chair in Engineering and is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC) and serves as the director of the Center for Energy Informatics(CEI). He is an associate member of the Center for Applied Mathematical Sciences (CAMS). He leads the Integrated Optimizations (IO) efforts at the USC-Chevron Center of Excellence for Research and Academic Training on Interactive Smart Oilfield Technologies (CiSoft) at USC and the demand response optimizations in the LA Smartgrid project. His research interests include High Performance Computing, Parallel and Distributed Systems, Reconfigurable Computing, Cloud Computing and Smart Energy Systems. He received his BS in Electronics Engineering from the Bangalore University, MS from the School of Automation, Indian Institute of Science and Ph.D in Computer Science from the Pennsylvania State University.

Prasanna has published extensively and consulted for industries in the above areas. He is the Steering Committee Co-Chair of the International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) [merged IEEE International Parallel Processing Symposium (IPPS) and Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing (SPDP)]. He is the Steering Committee Chair of the International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC). In the past, he has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), Journal of Pervasive and Mobile Computing, and the Proceedings of the IEEE. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing and the ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems. During 2003-'06, he was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computers. He was the founding chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Parallel Processing. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC).

Prasanna received W. Wallace McDowell Award from the IEEE Computer Society in 2015 for his contributions to reconfigurable computing. His work on regular expression matching received one of the most significant papers in FCCM during its first 20 years award in 2013. He received an Outstanding Engineering Alumnus Award from the Pennsylvania State University in 2009. He has received best paper awards at several international forums including ACM Computing Frontiers (CF), IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS), International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD), International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems (PDCS), IEEE International Conference on High Performance Switches and Routers (HPSR), among others. He is a recipient of the 2005 Okawa Foundation Grant. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS).


Research Summary

Parallel and distributed systems, embedded systems, configurable architectures, reconfigurable computing, high performance computing, parallel computing, parallel algorithms, FPGAs, accelerators, applications of machine learning, data science, big data, smartgrid, smart grid, smart energy systems, energy informatics, HPC, Cloud, multicore, multi-core, GPU.

Awards

  • 2015 Bangalore University, India Distinguished Alumnus Award, University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering, Bengaluru, India
  • 2015 INSTICC – Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication Conference Best Paper Award
  • 2015 IEEE Computer Society 2015 W. Wallace McDowell Award
  • 2013 IEEE FCCM Conference Award for One of the Most Significant Papers in FCCM during its First 20 Years
  • 2013 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM '13) Best Paper Award
  • 2012 IEEE High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR) 2012 Conference Best Paper
  • 2012 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud, and Grid Computing (CCGrid) IEEE International Scalable Computing Challenge
  • 2010 American Association for Advancement of Science Fellow
  • 2010 22nd IASTED International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems (PDCS '10) Best Paper Award in the Area of Parallel Computing
  • 2010 11th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR '10) Best Paper Award
  • 2010 IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Service Award
  • 2010 American Society for Advancement of Science AAAS Honors
  • 2009 2009 World Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing (WORLDCOMP '09) Outstanding Achievement Award
  • 2009 21st IASTED International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems (PDCS '09) Best Paper Award in Network Performance Area
  • 2009 21st International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems (PDCS '09) Best Paper Award in the Area of Parallel Computing
  • 2009 Pennsylvania State University Outstanding Engineering Alumnus Award
  • 2008 IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (TCPP) Outstanding Service Award
  • 2008 International Conference on Computing Frontiers(ACM CF’08). Best Paper Award
  • 2008 The 22nd IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS ’08). Best Paper Award
  • 2008 Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow
  • 2007 University of Geneva Docteur Honoris Causa
  • 2007 TCPP Outstanding Service Award
  • 2006 Endowed Chair Professorship
  • 2006 Best Paper
  • 2005 Okawa Foundation Award
Appointments
  • Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
  • Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Office
  • EEB 200C
  • Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center
  • 3740 McClintock Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90089
  • USC Mail Code: 2562
Contact Information
  • (213) 740-4483
  • prasanna@usc.edu
Links