ISI Names Two New Fellows
USC Viterbi’s Information Sciences Institute’s (ISI) signal honor, the title of ISI Fellow, is periodically awarded to the most exceptional researchers at ISI. It is the highest scientific engineering rank at the Institute. Ewa Deelman and Yolanda Gil recently received this distinction, bringing the group to four total ISI Fellows and four ISI Fellows Emeritus, across all disciplines.
These individuals have a widely recognized international reputation and have demonstrated exceptional achievements in science or engineering that are relevant to the Institute’s core Mission (e.g., seminal discoveries or advances that have broad influence impact) or have provided critical technology leadership of major complex high-priority projects or programs that impact in the future direction of ISI or its mission.
Additionally, ISI Fellows have demonstrated their commitment to ISI by participating in internal activities such as mentoring or external actions such as advancing ISI’s stature among research organizations.
The Fellows were announced by ISI Keston Executive Director Craig Knoblock in his annual State of the Institute address on January 20, 2023. Knoblock said, “We have an amazing group of people at ISI and I’m thrilled that we can honor two of our truly remarkable researchers with the distinction of becoming an ISI Fellow. Ewa and Yolanda have both made significant contributions in their research and made ISI more visible to the larger world.”
Ewa Deelman
Deelman has been recognized for her “contributions to the automation of scientific computing applications and advancing the role of computation in scientific domains of societal importance,” according to the ISI selection committee.
“I am honored to be recognized as an ISI Fellow,” said Deelman. “I look forward to continuing my research in distributed computing, developing computation automation capabilities, and advancing how cyberinfrastructure is utilized in the science community.”
Deelman’s research includes studying how to best support the execution of complex scientific applications on a variety of computational environments, including campus clusters, high-performance systems, distributed systems, and clouds. She has designed new algorithms for job scheduling, resource provisioning, and data storage optimization in the context of scientific workflows.
At ISI, Deelman is a Research Professor, Principal Scientist, and Research Director of Scientific Computation Technologies. Her main area of research is distributed computing with a focus on scientific workflows and systems.
Yolanda Gil
Gil has been recognized for her ”contributions on knowledge capture and scientific workflows and for promoting the work on AI at ISI to the larger community,” according to the ISI selection committee.
Upon receiving the award, Gil commented, “I started my career at ISI in 1992; 30 years ago last year. I want to thank everybody in the ISI community. I have found nothing but great people to work with from students to the business office to facilities to project assistants. I’ve had great terrific research collaborators in every division.”
Gil said, “It is a very special honor to be recognized by my colleagues. ISI has so many talented and passionate people, it really provides a unique collaborative environment to be creative and open new avenues of research in computing and information sciences. I am also very thankful to my students and postdocs who have taken our academic research out into the world, transforming science through the FAIR data principles, creating standards for climate data, and launching Wikidata to structure encyclopedic knowledge. I look forward to many more years ahead.”
Gil’s research is in AI for scientific discovery. She collaborates with scientists in many domains on semantic workflows and metadata capture, provenance and trust, social knowledge collection, computer-mediated collaboration, and automated discovery.
She is a Principal Scientist and Senior Director for Strategic Initiatives in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at ISI, Director of AI and Data Science Initiatives in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, and Research Professor in Computer Science and in Spatial Sciences.
Published on February 27th, 2023
Last updated on February 27th, 2023