Information

In 1971, Dr. Agrawala joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. He also holds joint positions with University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) and the Department of Electrical Engineering. For the past thirty Years, he has pursued research activities in the design, implementation and performance of computer systems. He is recognized for achievements in the areas of transient analysis of queues, distributed algorithms, and hard real-time systems design. Much of his research has gained national and corporate recognition through practical applications of his innovative solutions in these areas worldwide.

Achievements include:

• Clustering for the characterization of workloads in computer systems, now a common approach in the design of benchmarks for computer procurements
• Techniques for the transient analysis of queues leading to the solution of unsolved problems in the design and control of multi-computer systems
• Introducing the Ricart/Agrawala algorithm for distributed mutual exclusion leading to major worldwide research activities
• Development of the Maruti Operating System and program development environment demonstrating temporal guarantees of few tens of nanoseconds for making any software event happen while running on commercial Pentium processors
• Development of Cyclone technology giving a jitter-free, loss-free delivery of data end-to-end in very high speed networks
• Development of highly accurate location technology that allows users to locate objects within inches of specified coordinates both indoors and outdoors which will be the basis for one his MIND Lab proposed projects
• Development and organization of the MIND Lab that he will direct.

He is the author of seven books and over two hundred technical papers.

Professor Agrawala has served as consultant to the UNDP, Government of India, and as a technical expert for legal casework. His research activities have been supported by various federal agencies including DARPA, NSF, and AFOSR. Corporate support has been received from IBM, Novell, AT&T, and others.

Professor Agrawala's former students includes more that thirty Ph.D. graduates who serve on the faculty of prestigious universities, as well as in nationally recognized industrial research labs and successful high tech companies operating both nationally and abroad.

Before joining the faculty of the Department of Computer Science, Professor Agrawala worked at Honeywell information Systems where he successfully designed an Optical Character Reader.

Professor Agrawala received B.E. and M.E. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Sciences, Banglore, India; Masters and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of then ACM, AAAS, and Sigma Xi.