Ashok Agrawala is Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Maryland at College Park and Director of the Maryland Information and Network Dynamics (MIND) Lab. He is the author of seven books and over two hundred peer-reviewed publications. Glenn Ricart and Ashok Agrawala developed the Ricart-Agrawala Algorithm. The Ricart-Agrawala Algorithm is an algorithm for mutual exclusion on a distributed system. This algorithm is an extension and optimization of Lamport's Distributed Mutual Exclusion Algorithm.
Agrawala received B.E. and M.E. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India in 1963 and 1965 respectively; Masters and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts under the supervision of Yu-Chi Ho in 1970. [1]
He started his professional career as Senior Engineer at the Applied Research Lab of Honeywell in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1968 and developed an Optical character recognition machine. He started his academic career at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1971 as Assistant Professor of Computer Science where he rose to the rank of Full Professor in 1982.
He has at least two children, including computer-graphics researcher Maneesh Agrawala. [2]
Agrawala started the MIND Lab (Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab) [3] in 2001 and continues to serve as its director. The Lab has been involved in the development indoor location technology and accurate clock synchronization technology, and actively participated in the semantic web research. The technologies developed in the MIND lab have resulted in 4 startup companies in Maryland. he also started the MAXWell Lab which became the only WiMAX Forum Applications Lab in the western hemisphere.
Recently his work focuses on Context-aware pervasive systems and has developed, M-Urgency, a system to support public safety by providing real-time audio and video, along with location etc. from an incident scene. The general framework for context-aware system is being developed as Rover System which is designed to provide relevant information to decision makers about a situation at hand.
In a research study, he was recognized to be the 27th top nurturer in Computer Science in the world. [4]
He was elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1991 [5] for contributions to distributed algorithms and policies for computer systems [6] and a Fellow of the AAAS in 2005. He is a Senior Member of then ACM, and a member of Sigma Xi.
Context awareness refers, in information and communication technologies, to a capability to take into account the situation of entities, which may be users or devices, but are not limited to those. Location is only the most obvious element of this situation. Narrowly defined for mobile devices, context awareness does thus generalize location awareness. Whereas location may determine how certain processes around a contributing device operate, context may be applied more flexibly with mobile users, especially with users of smart phones. Context awareness originated as a term from ubiquitous computing or as so-called pervasive computing which sought to deal with linking changes in the environment with computer systems, which are otherwise static. The term has also been applied to business theory in relation to contextual application design and business process management issues.
Hsiang-Tsung Kung is a Taiwanese-born American computer scientist. He is the William H. Gates professor of computer science at Harvard University. His early research in parallel computing produced the systolic array in 1979, which has since become a core computational component of hardware accelerators for artificial intelligence, including Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). Similarly, he proposed optimistic concurrency control in 1981, now a key principle in memory and database transaction systems, including MySQL, Apache CouchDB, Google's App Engine, and Ruby on Rails. He remains an active researcher, with ongoing contributions to computational complexity theory, hardware design, parallel computing, routing, wireless communication, signal processing, and artificial intelligence.
David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Previously, he served as the Chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Computational Science & Engineering, where he was also a founding professor, and the executive director of High-Performance Computing at the Georgia Tech College of Computing. In 2007, he was named the first director of the Sony Toshiba IBM Center of Competence for the Cell Processor at Georgia Tech.
Ben Shneiderman is an American computer scientist, a Distinguished University Professor in the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the founding director (1983-2000) of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab. He conducted fundamental research in the field of human–computer interaction, developing new ideas, methods, and tools such as the direct manipulation interface, and his eight rules of design.
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The Ricart–Agrawala algorithm is an algorithm for mutual exclusion on a distributed system. This algorithm is an extension and optimization of Lamport's Distributed Mutual Exclusion Algorithm, by removing the need for messages. It was developed by computer scientists Glenn Ricart and Ashok Agrawala.
Maekawa's algorithm is an algorithm for mutual exclusion on a distributed system. The basis of this algorithm is a quorum-like approach where any one site needs only to seek permissions from a subset of other sites.
Ashok Jhunjhunwala is an Indian academic and innovator. He received his B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and PhD from the University of Maine. He has been a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras since 1981. He is the President of IIT Madras Research Park and Chairman of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. During his career, he has contributed extensively to technology innovation and adoption in the Indian context.
Kanianthra Mani Chandy is the Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He has been the Executive Officer of the Computer Science Department twice, and he has been a professor at Caltech since 1989. He also served as Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology.
An indoor positioning system (IPS) is a network of devices used to locate people or objects where GPS and other satellite technologies lack precision or fail entirely, such as inside multistory buildings, airports, alleys, parking garages, and underground locations.
Glenn Ricart is a computer scientist. He was influential in the development of the Internet (ARPANET) going back to 1969 and early implementation of the TCP/IP protocol. Since then he has been active in technology and business as well as donating his time to philanthropic and educational movements.
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Lamport's Distributed Mutual Exclusion Algorithm is a contention-based algorithm for mutual exclusion on a distributed system.
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Maneesh Agrawala is a professor of computer science at Stanford University. He returned to Stanford in 2015 as the director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, after nearly a decade on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Moustafa Youssef is an Egyptian computer scientist who was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2019 for contributions to wireless location tracking technologies and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2019 for contributions to location tracking algorithms. He is the first and only ACM Fellow in the Middle East and Africa.
Valérie Issarny was a Director of Research at the National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (INRIA), France. Issarny was known for her research in middleware solutions for distributed collaborative services, including mobile services deployed over smartphones that interact with sensors.
1.Glenn Ricart and Ashok Agrawala, “An Optimal Algorithm for Mutual Exclusion in Computer Networks”, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 23, No. 1, January 1981, pp. 9–17.
2. Shem-Tov Levi and Ashok Agrawala, "Real-Time System Design", McGraw Hill, New York, 1990.
3. Shem-Tov Levi and Ashok Agrawala, "Fault Tolerant System Design", McGraw Hill, New York, 1993.
4. Ashok Agrawala et al., “Rover: Scalable Location-Aware Computing”, IEEE Computer, IEEE Computer Society, Vol 35, No. 10, October 2002, pp. 46–53.
5. S. Krishnamoorthy, P. Bhargava, Matthew Mah and Ashok Agrawala, “Representing and Managing the Context of a Situation,” The Computer Journal, Vol. 55, Issue 8, pages 1005-1019, 2012 Oxford University Press.
6. Moustafa Youseff and Ashok Agrawala, “The Horus Location Determination System,” Journal of Wireless Networks (WINET), 2007.
VITA Samaritan of the Year Award 2012
WUSA9 NEWS on Dr. Ashok Agrawala: M-Urgency: Groundbreaking Smartphone App Fights Crime at UMD
BBC News-Mobile phone applications built to save lives
Crimefighting App Launched At University, Created By Professor and Team
Cool app: University app turns smartphones into live broadcast tool for security