Kale, Zhai win HP Labs Innovation Research Awards

Computer science professors Laxmikant “Sanjay” Kale and ChengXiang Zhai have each won HP Labs Innovation Research Program Awards for 2012. Kale will investigate key topics in cloud and high performance computing (HPC), while Zhai will explore new methods for gathering and analyzing text-based opinion data.

Kale’s Parallel Programming Laboratory, in partnership with researchers at HP’s Intelligent Infrastructure Lab, will tackle the challenges of dealing with highly heterogeneous resources in cloud computing. His project, "Towards Efficient Mapping, Scheduling and Execution of HPC Applications on Platforms in Cloud," builds on previous work that uses market-driven strategies to handle scenarios where the demand for resources varies and the system load fluctuates. 

Researchers will also explore techniques for how HPC applications can execute efficiently in virtualized environments and under various HPC usage-models. It is anticipated that this work will help to narrow the gap between the promises offered by cloud computing and its actual real-world use by the HPC community. Zhai will lead work on “Opinion Analysis for Enhanced Live Business Intelligence,” with collaborators at HP working in the area of Information Analytics. The goal is to utilize multiple online data sources to better gather, monitor, and synthesize information that would be useful and relevant for real-time business decision-making. 

Researchers will look to develop new text mining techniques to more efficiently and effectively discover and analyze opinions buried in large amounts of text data, like product reviews, news, and social media content. Zhai’s team aims to create a flexible formal framework for opinion analytics that will be suitable for a variety of applications. As a part of this work, they plan to develop new algorithms based on time series models in order to analyze opinion dynamics, discover causal topics and opinions, and predict future trends of opinions.

HP Labs' Innovation Research Program (IRP) is designed to create opportunities at colleges, universities and research institutes around the world for collaborative research with HP. In 2012 the IRP attracted more than 500 proposals from 441 researchers at 257 universities in more than 30 countries. After careful review by HP Labs scientists and technologists, 61 professors in 46 institutions in 11 countries have been selected to receive a 2012 HP Labs Innovation Research Award. Awards provide one year of financial support for a graduate research assistant, renewable for up to two additional years.
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Contact: Laxmikant Kale, Department of Computer Science, 217/244-0094.

ChengXiang Zhai, Department of Computer Science, 217/244-4943.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.