Pedro Szekely has spent his entire professional career working to make computers more useful and easier to use. This has led him to make contributions in many areas in computer science. In human-computer interaction he pioneered model-based techniques to generate easy-to-use interfaces from simple, high-level specifications, contributing to reducing the cost for implementing user-interface software. In visualization he developed tools to easily generate sophisticated visualizations of complex data, focusing on time-oriented data. In data-query he developed techniques to enable casual users to easily ask complex questions using metaphors that hide queries from users and enables them to focus on their data. In multi-agent systems, he developed algorithms to enable distributed teams of people to coordinate their activities, lowering the risks and pitfalls of coordination breakdowns. In planning and scheduling he developed algorithms and user interfaces to easily adapt their plans during execution to cope with disruptions in dynamic environments.

Dr. Szekely is currently working in Craig Knoblock's information integration group, focusing on bio-informatics and education applications where he is working to help biologists, doctors and educators leverage the vast amounts of data that exist in these domains to enable them to make better decisions. To this end, he is leveraging his experience in human-computer interaction, visualization, data query and algorithms to create new tools to enable practitioners to easily integrate heterogeneous data sources, to query them and to visualize them.

During his 20+ year career, Dr. Szekely has been active in the academic community. He has published over 70 conference and journal papers in human-computer interaction, visualization and multi-agent systems, served as the conference chair for two leading human-computer interaction conferences, regularly serves on conference program committees, graduated 4 Ph.D. students, and served in the dissertation committee of 13 students.

Dr. Szekely has also led several research consortiums. Most recently, from 2006 to 2009, he led ISI's DARPA-funded COORDINATORS project to construct software agents to help distributed teams of users adapt their plans to changing environments. In this consortial effort with Vanderbilt University and Kestrel Institute, ISI's team achieved first place in all DARPA yearly evaluations, outperforming the systems from the other consortia on over 98% of the evaluation scenarios, and becoming the only team to succeed in the field trials.

From 2000 to 2005, he led a team to develop technology to help US Marines manage the training curriculum and mission schedules to train Harrier jet (AV8B) pilots. The system integrated advanced scheduling algorithms with decision support and visualization interfaces to enable officers to manage the complex sequence of missions required to train pilots. In 5 years the system went from conception to deployment in the US Marines MAG-13 Air Base in Yuma, Arizona and on board five ships in Middle East combat operations. The positive Military Utility Assessment from USMC resulting from that deployment led to a USMC technology adoption recommendation to both USMC internal programs and the Joint Strike Fighter Program.

Prior to that he led efforts in human-computer interaction, Semantic Web, expert systems, decision support, and has been key personnel in multiple information integration, visualization and human-computer interaction efforts.

Pedro Szekely received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1982 and 1987 and joined USC ISI in 1988.