Lindi Liao, Ph.D.
President & Chief Scientist, COMStar Computing
Dr. Liao is the President & Chief Scientist of
COMStar Computing . She also serves as Adjunct Professor at George Mason University and PhD
Co-Advisor on the doctoral dissertation committees at
George Washington University
, General Chair of
COM.* Conferences and Summits (
COM.BigData,
COM.DriverlessCar,
COM.VR/COM.Wearable,
COM.Geo, etc.), Technical Advisor, and funding committee member to several
federal agencies. She was Head of Tech Research of a giant group enterprise of 'Global Fortune 30' and CTO of a large education technology group company. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. in computer science
from George Washington University and Purdue University, respectively.
Dr. Liao has around 20 years of in-depth both academic and industrial technical
experience. She also has 10+ years of relevant management experience. Her
major tech fields are in
AI, Big Data computing, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP),
Driverless Cars, VR/AR,
Visualization & Imaging, GPGPU, GIS, Multi-Core Architectures, Wearable Computing, Brain Computing, Bioinformatics, Real-Time Embedded Systems,
etc. She has developed and led many related projects for federal
governments, industries, and universities. She initiated COM.Geo, and organized
several IEEE/ACM conferences and summits as General Chair. COM.Geo has been
playing a guiding role to advancing the technologies in geospatial computing.
Dr. Liao launched several important labs, such as
AI & Big Data Lab
,
VR Lab, and
Imaging & Vis Lab, and engaged in research and technology commercialization.
Especially, her team's latest
groundbreaking intelligent Big Data Computing technology
based on a new type of brain computational model
(a new AI) has attracted more attentions nowadays in comparison
with existing traditional BIg Data technologies. she also creatively designed
a novel multi-core architecture without conventional parallel programing
for Big Data streams. Several patents related to Big Data tech are being
filed and have been filed or authorized.
Dr. Liao ever worked at
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and
Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) of
U.S. Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT) for years. She was a key
team member of developing the new-generation PC-clustered Highway Driving
Simulator (
HDS) at FHWA and an enterprise-version software tool (
SDAT) for global aviation community at FAA. She ever worked at
ESRI
and developed the first version of Stereo Viewer for ESRI leading product --
ArcGIS. She independently first developed
GLISTEN – An Analytic Visualization Tool for Bioinformatics &
Statistics funded by
NIH/
NCI. When she was a young student in 1996, she conceived and pioneered
the novel product development of the PC-based high-resolution quad-buffered
3D stereographic accelerators using the earliest single PC graphics chips
invented by
3D Labs. Then she led a team and developed the first PC-VR system using
such 3D stereographics accelerators and Head-Mounted Displays (HMD).
Besides her comprehensive and intensive industrial software & hardware
product development experience, Dr. Liao also has rich research experiences.
She has authorized nearly one hundred publications, including one book chapter
on Big Data Computing, and two technical books on GPU-based R&A and OpenGL
programming, served as Conference General Chair of
2010-2014 COM.* Conferences and Summits (
COM.BigData,
COM.DriverlessCar,
COM.Geo), and edited five
IEEE/ACM Proceedings
. She has been invited to give the talks by the federal governments,
universities, and leading industries (AMD, Siemens, etc.). She is a member
of
ACM and
IEEE and serves as a technical reviewer for conferences and journals.
Simon Y. Berkovich, Ph.D.
Sr. Principal Research Scientist, COMStar Computing
Professor Simon Berkovich played a leading role in a number of research and development projects on the design of advanced hardware and software systems. Those projects include construction of superconductive associative memory, development of large information systems for economics, investigation of computer communications for multiprocessor systems, and enhancement of information retrieval procedures. His recent research focuses on Big Data Computing based on brain computing. Dr. Berkovich has several hundred professional publications in various areas of physics, electronics, computer science, and biological cybernetics. He is an author of six books and holds 30 patents. Among his inventions is a method for dynamic file construction that later become known as B-tree and extendible hashing. In 2002, he was elected a member of the European Academy of Sciences "for an outstanding contribution to computer science and the development of fundamental computational algorithms". Professor Berkovich received an M.S. in Applied Physics from Moscow Physical-Technical Institute and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Technology of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
Christoph M. Hoffmann, Ph.D.
Professor of Computer Science, Purdue University
Prof. Hoffmann is well-known for his research in geometric modeling and applications. A proponent of rigorous semantics, he articulated the robustness problem hindering shape computations and worked out procedural semantics for form features in CAD systems, through a neutral representation. This work also included addressing the persistent naming problem and geometric constraint solving. Professor Hoffmann is the author of Group-Theoretic Algorithms and Graph Isomorphism, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 136, Springer-Verlag and of Geometric and Solid Modeling: An Introduction, published by Morgan Kaufmann, Inc. Professor Hoffmann has received international media attention for his work simulating the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. He was awarded the Piere Bézier prize by the Solid Modeling Association in 2011 for his pioneering role in geometric modeling. Before joining the Purdue faculty, Professor Hoffmann taught at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He has also been a visiting professor at the Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, West Germany (1980), and at Cornell University (1984-1986). Prof. Hoffmann received his Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin.