Randal Burns

Last updated
Randal Burns
CitizenshipUnited States
OccupationComputer Scientist
TitleProfessor
Academic background
Alma mater University of California, Santa Cruz
Stanford University
Thesis Data Management in a Distributed File System for Storage Area Networks (2000)
Doctoral advisor Darrell Long
Website randalburns.github.io

Randal Chilton Burns is a professor and Chair of the computer science department at Johns Hopkins University. He is a member of the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute, Institute for Data-Intensive Science, Engineering and the Science of Learning Institute and National Academy of Sciences. His research interests lie in building scalable data systems for exploration and analysis of big data. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Contents

Education and early career

Burns graduated from Stanford University in 1993 with a bachelor's degree in geophysics. [6] He earned his master's and doctorate from University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1997 and 2000 respectively. He also worked as a research staff member at IBM's Alamden Research Center between 1996 and 2002. [1]

Research

Burns's PhD dissertation is titled 'Data Management in a Distributed File System for Storage Area Networks'. [7] He has worked on waste management of unused digital data. [8] [9] He was part of a team along with Alex Szalay and Charles Meneveau which built a 350TB turbulence database that provides access to large computational fluid dynamics simulations. [10] [11] In recent times, his research has focused on neuroscience where he built a cloud based web-service for neuroscience data and enabled better understanding of the human brain. [12] [13] [14] [15]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neuroscience</span> Scientific study of the nervous system

Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system, its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmental biology, cytology, psychology, physics, computer science, chemistry, medicine, statistics, and mathematical modeling to understand the fundamental and emergent properties of neurons, glia and neural circuits. The understanding of the biological basis of learning, memory, behavior, perception, and consciousness has been described by Eric Kandel as the "epic challenge" of the biological sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mind uploading</span> Hypothetical process of digitally emulating a brain

Mind uploading is a speculative process of whole brain emulation in which a brain scan is used to completely emulate the mental state of the individual in a digital computer. The computer would then run a simulation of the brain's information processing, such that it would respond in essentially the same way as the original brain and experience having a sentient conscious mind.

Neuromorphic computing is an approach to computing that is inspired by the structure and function of the human brain. A neuromorphic computer/chip is any device that uses physical artificial neurons to do computations. In recent times, the term neuromorphic has been used to describe analog, digital, mixed-mode analog/digital VLSI, and software systems that implement models of neural systems. The implementation of neuromorphic computing on the hardware level can be realized by oxide-based memristors, spintronic memories, threshold switches, transistors, among others. Training software-based neuromorphic systems of spiking neural networks can be achieved using error backpropagation, e.g., using Python based frameworks such as snnTorch, or using canonical learning rules from the biological learning literature, e.g., using BindsNet.

Terrence Joseph Sejnowski is the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and is the director of the Crick-Jacobs center for theoretical and computational biology. He has performed pioneering research in neural networks and computational neuroscience.

Neuroinformatics is the emergent field that combines informatics and neuroscience. Neuroinformatics is related with neuroscience data and information processing by artificial neural networks. There are three main directions where neuroinformatics has to be applied:

The Blue Brain Project is a Swiss brain research initiative that aims to create a digital reconstruction of the mouse brain. The project was founded in May 2005 by the Brain Mind Institute of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. Its mission is to use biologically-detailed digital reconstructions and simulations of the mammalian brain to identify the fundamental principles of brain structure and function.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pasko Rakic</span> Yugoslav-born American neuroscientist (born 1933)

Pasko Rakic is a Yugoslav-born American neuroscientist, who presently works in the Yale School of Medicine Department of Neuroscience in New Haven, Connecticut. His main research interest is in the development and evolution of the human brain. He was the founder and served as Chairman of the Department of Neurobiology at Yale, and was founder and Director of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience. He is best known for elucidating the mechanisms involved in development and evolution of the cerebral cortex. In 2008, Rakic shared the inaugural Kavli Prize in Neuroscience. He is currently the Dorys McConell Duberg Professor of Neuroscience, leads an active research laboratory, and serves on Advisory Boards and Scientific Councils of a number of Institutions and Research Foundations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Randal Bryant</span> American computer scientist (born 1952)

Randal E. Bryant is an American computer scientist and academic noted for his research on formally verifying digital hardware and software. Bryant has been a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University since 1984. He served as the Dean of the School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon from 2004 to 2014. Dr. Bryant retired and became a Founders University Professor Emeritus on June 30, 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kavli Prize</span> Award

The Kavli Prize was established in 2005 as a joint venture of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, and the Kavli Foundation. It honors, supports, and recognizes scientists for outstanding work in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience. Three prizes are awarded every second year. Each of the three Kavli Prizes consists of a gold medal, a scroll, and a cash award of US$1,000,000. The medal has a diameter of 70 millimetres (2.8 in), a thickness of 5 millimetres (0.20 in), and weighs 311 grams (11.0 oz).

Winfried Denk is a German physicist. He built the first two-photon microscope while he was a graduate student in Watt W. Webb's lab at Cornell University, in 1989.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eve Marder</span> American neuroscientist

Eve Marder is a University Professor and the Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of Neuroscience at Brandeis University. At Brandeis, Marder is also a member of the Volen National Center for Complex Systems. Dr. Marder is known for her pioneering work on small neuronal networks which her team has interrogated via a combination of complementary experimental and theoretical techniques.

The Sidney Fernbach Award established in 1992 by the IEEE Computer Society, in memory of Sidney Fernbach, one of the pioneers in the development and application of high performance computers for the solution of large computational problems as the Division Chief for the Computation Division at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory from the late 1950s through the 1970s. A certificate and $2,000 are awarded for outstanding contributions in the application of high performance computers using innovative approaches. The nomination deadline is 1 July each year.

The White House BRAIN Initiative is a collaborative, public-private research initiative announced by the Obama administration on April 2, 2013, with the goal of supporting the development and application of innovative technologies that can create a dynamic understanding of brain function.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John O'Keefe (neuroscientist)</span> American–British neuroscientist

John O'Keefe, is an American-British neuroscientist, psychologist and a professor at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour and the Research Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at University College London. He discovered place cells in the hippocampus, and that they show a specific kind of temporal coding in the form of theta phase precession. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014, together with May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser; he has received several other awards. He has worked at University College London for his entire career, but also held a part-time chair at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology at the behest of his Norwegian collaborators, the Mosers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alex Szalay</span> Astrophysicist, researcher (born 1949)

Alex Szalay is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of physics and astronomy and computer science at the Johns Hopkins University School of Arts and Sciences and Whiting School of Engineering. Szalay is an international leader in astronomy, cosmology, the science of big data, and data‐intensive computing. In 2023, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Sean Lewis Hill is an American neuroscientist, Professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine, and inaugural Scientific Director of the Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics in Toronto, Canada. He is also co-director of the Blue Brain Project at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne located on the Campus Biotech in Geneva, Switzerland. He is known for the development of large-scale computational models of brain circuitry, neuroinformatics, and innovation in AI for mental health.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rafael Yuste</span> Neuroscientist and neurorights advocate (born 1963)

Rafael Yuste is a Spanish–American neurobiologist and one of the initiators of the BRAIN Initiative announced in 2013. He is currently a professor at Columbia University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Meneveau</span>

Charles Meneveau is a French-Chilean born American fluid dynamicist, known for his work on turbulence, including turbulence modeling and computational fluid dynamics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pavan Ramdya</span> US-American neuroscientist

Pavan Ramdya is an American and Swiss neuroscientist and bioengineer. His research centers on understanding the cognitive and neuromechanical control of behavior toward applications in robotics and artificial intelligence. He holds the Firmenich Next Generation Chair in neuroscience and bioengineering at EPFL, and is head of the Neuroengineering Laboratory at EPFL's School of Life Sciences.

References

  1. 1 2 "Randal Burns". Department of Computer Science. Retrieved 2019-06-14.
  2. ↑ "Kavli NDI". kavlijhu.org. Retrieved 2019-06-14.
  3. ↑ "Randal Burns – The Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science" . Retrieved 2019-06-14.
  4. ↑ "Randal Burns". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 2019-06-14.
  5. ↑ "Our Experts | |Science of Learning". scienceoflearning.jhu.edu. Retrieved 2019-06-14.
  6. ↑ "Randal Burns". ieeexplore.ieee.org. Retrieved 2022-11-18.
  7. ↑ "Randal Burns - The Mathematics Genealogy Project". www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu. Retrieved 2019-06-14.
  8. ↑ Schaffhauser, Dian (2011-09-08). "Researchers Throw Out Digital Waste Scheme". Campus Technology. Retrieved 2019-06-14.
  9. ↑ "5 tactics for dumping digital trash". Futurity. 2011-09-06. Retrieved 2019-06-14.
  10. ↑ Szalay, Alexander; Meneveau, Charles; Burns, Randal; Bürger, Kai; Kanov, Kalin; Aluie, Hussein; Lalescu, Cristian; Vishniac, Ethan; Eyink, Gregory (May 2013). "Flux-freezing breakdown in high-conductivity magnetohydrodynamic turbulence". Nature. 497 (7450): 466–469. Bibcode:2013Natur.497..466E. doi:10.1038/nature12128. ISSN   1476-4687. PMID   23698445. S2CID   205233857.
  11. ↑ Perlman, Eric; Burns, Randal; Li, Yi; Meneveau, Charles (2007). "Data exploration of turbulence simulations using a database cluster". Proceedings of the 2007 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing. pp. 1–11. doi:10.1145/1362622.1362654. ISBN   9781595937643. S2CID   11021323.
  12. ↑ "Closer view of the brain". Harvard Gazette. 2015-10-12. Retrieved 2019-06-14.
  13. ↑ Perkel, Jeffrey M. (2018-10-30). "Web service makes big data available to neuroscientists". Nature. 563 (7729): 143. Bibcode:2018Natur.563..143P. doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-07195-2 . PMID   30377329.
  14. ↑ "Neuroinformatics 2013: Randal Burns". www.neuroinformatics2013.org. Retrieved 2019-06-14.
  15. ↑ "Scientists Discuss BRAIN Initiative". The Scientist Magazine. Retrieved 2019-06-14.
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