Srikanta Tirthapura, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been selected as a recipient of the 2014 IBM Faculty Award, his second-straight selection. The IBM Faculty Award is an annual, worldwide competitive program intended to foster collaboration between researchers at leading universities, and those at IBM.
“It’s a competitive process,” Tirthapura said. “Every year there’s a competition that happens and a lot of people get nominated. I’m honored to win again.”
Tirthapura received the award in recognition of his research and education program in the area of large- scale data analysis and mining.
“I work closely with a team at IBM T.J.Watson Research Center.” Tirthapura said. “They’re the research group behind the streaming data platform that is an important component of IBM’s “big data” thrust. We are designing scalable algorithms that run on such platforms.” The $30,000 award will be used to fund students and further Iowa State’s big data education and research initiatives.
Iowa State has a synergistic research and education program with IBM. Tirthapura’s research on streaming data analysis complements IBM’s streaming data platform and helps the platform scale to large-scale tasks. A number of his education initiatives work in conjunction with IBM software and he holds multiple United States patents jointly with IBM.
“It’s a good match,” said Tirthapura of his relationship with IBM “IBM is keenly interested in the work we do here.”