Chaitan Baru

Dr. Chaitanya Baru is Senior Science Advisor in the Convergence Accelerator Office. He is there on assignment from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), University of California, San Diego. He previously served at NSF, from August 2014-2018, as Senior Advisor for Data Science in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate. During that time, he co-chaired the NSF Harnessing the Data Revolution Big Idea (HDR) and also played a leadership role in the NSF BIGDATA program, where he was instrumental in establishing a partnership between NSF and the four major public cloud providers, viz, AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure, and IBM. He helped initiate the HDR Data Science Corps program, was an advisor to the NSF Big Data Regional Innovations Hubs and TRIPODS programs, and supported a series of workshops on Translational Data Science. He has served as co-chair of the NIST Public Working Group on Big Data and is currently co-chair of the Federal NITRD Big Data Interagency Working Group (BDIWG). He was a lead organizer of the NITRD BDIWG workshop on Open Knowledge Network, which led to establishment of Track A in the Convergence Accelerator on Open Knowledge Network (OKN).

Dr. Baru has worked on translational and applied research in computer science and data science at SDSC since 1996, where he has served in a number of leadership positions. One of his research projects on big data benchmarking engaged a group of industry partners and helped establish industry’s first benchmark standard for big data, viz., TPCx-BB. He has worked previously at IBM, on the DB2 Parallel Edition development team, and has been a faculty member in the EECS Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has an ME and PhD in Electrical Engineering (Computer Engineering) from the University of Florida and a BTech in Electronics Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.