Dr. Virendrakumar C. Bhavsar, Honorary Research Professor from the  Faculty of Computer Science at the University of New  Brunswick, Canada, will present a Department of Computer Science seminar with a talk entitled, " Convergence of Big Data, Internet of Things and High Performance Computing: Challenges and Opportunities".

The Internet of Things (IoT) in many applications would result in generation of large amounts of data, i.e. Big Data. In some applications, the data is continuously generated as a stream, wherein the data could be volatile. Such Big Data needs to be curated, aggregated, and analyzed at different levels, quite often using artificial intelligence algorithms for knowledge extraction and learning. In autonomic Big Data computing applications, the extracted knowledge is used for planning and executing the sequence actions necessary for the application. We argue that high performance computing (HPC) is crucial in satisfying computing requirements in many high end IoT applications. After a review of the current state of the areas, this talk will present challenges and opportunities in selected applications.

Dr. Virendrakumar C. Bhavsar is an Honorary Research Professor, the founding Director of the Advanced Computational Laboratory, and former Professor as well as Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. He is a Fellow of the International Institute of Cognitive Informatics and Cognitive Computing. He received the B.Eng. (Electronics and Telecommunications) from University of Poona, India, and the M.Tech. (Electrical Eng.) as well as Ph.D. (Electrical Eng.) degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He was a faculty member at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, 1974-83. Since 1983 he has been at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. 

He was a founding member, Board of Directors, C3.ca, Inc. – a high performance computing initiative in Canada. He is the President of the SAI Super and Intelligent Computer Systems, Inc., Fredericton. He has been a consultant to industries in the areas of semantic web, semantic search and matchmaking, artificial intelligence and high performance computing. He co-led the bioinformatics component of the Canadian Potato Genomics project. Recently, he led the Province of New Brunswick component of the Atlantic Computational Excellence Network (ACEnet) – a $30+ million high performance computing initiative in Atlantic Canada.

He has carried out research over more than 40 years in almost all areas of computer science and engineering. While at I.I.T. Bombay, he led the development of one of the first multi-microcomputer parallel computing systems in India, named Plexus. His current research interests include parallel and distributed processing, artificial intelligence including deep learning and their applications in natural language processing, e-Business, e-Learning, and bioinformatics. He has published more than 170 research papers in journals, conference proceedings, as well as book chapters, and has edited four volumes. He has organized many national and international conferences/workshops. He also has given numerous invited talks in national/international conferences and universities around the world.