Alumni Hall Of Fame

Vipin Kumar

Photo of Vipin Kumar
Graduation Year:
1982
Dissertation:
A unified approach to problem solving search procedures

Vipin Kumar received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 1982 under the guidance of Professor Laveen Kanal. After leaving Maryland, Vipin taught at the University of Texas at Austin before joining the University of Minnesota in 1989, where he is currently William Norris Professor and Head of the Computer Science and Engineering Department. During 1998-2005, he also served as the Director of the Army High-Performance Computing Research Center, which is a multi-university consortium funded by the US Army for HPC research.

Vipin is internationally recognized for his research in the areas of parallel computing, graph partitioning, and data mining. He and his students developed highly scalable parallel formulations of combinatorial algorithms (e.g., problem solving search algorthms used in Artificial Intelligence), numerical and graph algorithms that underly scientific and engineering simulations, and data mining algorithms for association pattern discovery and predictive modeling. One of Vipin's significant contributions is the isoefficiency metric for analyzing the scalability of parallel algorithms. This metric represented a major breakthrough in understanding scalability, and is now routinely covered in major textbooks on parallel computing.

Metis/ParMetis/hMetis (Serial and parallel graph-partitioning libraries developed by Vipin's group) are extensively used world-wide at academic institutions, national research labs, and various industries for partitioning irregular meshes that arise in scientific and engineering simulations, re-ordering sparse matrices for factorization, finding dense portions in large unstructured graphs for data mining, and for min-cut partitioning of VLSI circuits. Spatio-temporal data mining techniques developed by Vipin's group have been used to discover patterns in global climate by NASA scientists. These results have been published in a number of scientific articles (co-authored by Kumar and NASA scientists) and many of them have been highlighted in Press Releases from NASA Ames. February 2005 issue of "Mechanical Engineering", the magazine of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (equivalent of CACM and IEEE Computer) had a cover story on data mining that extensively covered Vipin's research on data mining and its applications in science and engineering.

Vipin has co-authored graduate level text books (Introduction to Parallel Computing and Introduction to Data Mining) that are used world-wide and have been translated in several languages. Vipin has also co-edited 6 books and published over 200 refereed research articles in journals and conferences. Many of his papers are amongst the most cited papers in computer science - Google Scholar shows more than 4,000 citations for just 10 of his papers and books. He has advised 18 PhDs, two of whom were among five finalists in the highly competitive ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Competition - Gupta (1995) and Lin (1988), and many are now faculty at major research universities: Grama (Purdue University), Karypis( University of Minnesota), Tan (Michigan State), and Xiong (Rutgers University Business School).

Vipin is regularly invited to give keynote and plenary lectures at major international conferences, and has served as a General Chair, Program Chair, Co-Chair, or Vice-Chair for over a dozen major international conferences sponso red by ACM, IEEE, and SIAM. He serves as the Chair of the steering committee of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining) and is on the steering committee of the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining. He is a founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of "Journal of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining" and Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Bulletin.

Vipin is a Fellow of the ACM and a Fellow of IEEE. He received the 2005 Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Computer Society for his contributions to the design and analysis of parallel algorithms, graph-partitioning, and data mining.

Inductees

Photo of Narendra Ahuja

Narendra Ahuja
PhD 1979

Photo of Michael Antonov

Michael Antonov
Bachelor's 2003

Photo of J. Gary Augustson

J. Gary Augustson
Master's 1969

Photo of David Baggett

David Baggett
Bachelor's 1992

Photo of Suman Banerjee

Suman Banerjee
PhD 2003

Photo of Sergey Brin

Sergey Brin
Bachelor's 1993

Photo of Paul Capriolo

Paul Capriolo
Bachelor's 2006

Photo of Anthony Casalena

Anthony Casalena
Bachelor's 2005

Photo of Charles Dyer

Charles Dyer
PhD 1979

Photo of Gary Flake

Gary Flake
PhD 1993

Photo of Rajiv Gandhi

Rajiv Gandhi
PhD 2003

Photo of Howard Gobioff

Howard Gobioff
Bachelor's 1993

Photo of Naresh Gupta

Naresh Gupta
PhD 1993

Photo of Patrick Jenkins

Patrick Jenkins
Bachelor's 2006

Photo of Vipin Kumar

Vipin Kumar
PhD 1982

Photo of Ronald Larsen

Ronald Larsen
PhD 1981

Photo of Haroon Mokhtarzada

Haroon Mokhtarzada
Bachelor's 2001

Photo of Idris Mokhtarzada

Idris Mokhtarzada
Bachelor's 2010

Photo of Zeki Mokhtarzada

Zeki Mokhtarzada
Bachelor's 2001

Photo of Shmuel Peleg

Shmuel Peleg
PhD 1979

Photo of Andrew Reisse

Andrew Reisse
Bachelor's 2001

Photo of Glenn Ricart

Glenn Ricart
PhD 1980

Photo of Debanjan Saha

Debanjan Saha
PhD 1995

Photo of Pooja Sankar

Pooja Sankar
Master's 2004

Photo of Jagdeep Singh

Jagdeep Singh
Bachelor's 1987

Photo of Aya Soffer

Aya Soffer
PhD 1995

Photo of Lee Spector

Lee Spector
PhD 1992

Photo of Granger Sutton

Granger Sutton
PhD 1992

Photo of Qiang Yang

Qiang Yang
PhD 1989

Photo of Shayan Zadeh

Shayan Zadeh
Master's 2002