Carnegie Mellon launches new distinguished lecture series in Computer Science

Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Prof. Randal E. Bryant, will be the first speaker in a new distinguished lecture series in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. In a lecture titled “Data-Intensive Scalable Computing”, Dean Bryant will discuss issues in computer systems in handling the massive datasets that are being produced by digital devices of all kinds, each and every day.

The School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University is a leading private school for computer science. Established in 1965, it is one of the first such departments in the nation. It has been consistently ranked among the top computer science programs over the decades. U.S. News & World Report currently ranks the graduate program as tied for 1^st with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and University of California, Berkeley.

Named after Professor A. Nico Haberman, head of the Computer Science Department between 1980 and 1988 and Founding Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, the lecture series enables the students at the Qatar campus to engage with prominent faculty and well-known leaders in the field of computer science.

Dean Bryant has been on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon since 1984, first as an Assistant Professor and now as a Professor of Computer Science. His research focuses primarily on methods for formally verifying digital hardware. He received his B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1973, and his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981. More recently, he has become interested in the opportunities and challenges presented by computer systems working with very large data sets – a topic he will concentrate on in Tuesday’s lecture.

Commenting on the importance establishing a lecture series on computer science in Qatar, not only for the avid, computing-literate student population, but also for the broader, more tech savvy Qatari society, Prof. Kemal Oflazer, coordinator of the Computer Science Program at Carnegie Mellon - Qatar, stated, “We are extremely delighted to host Dean Randy Bryant in Doha. Randy has been at forefront of computer science research and education for three decades and has been leading the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon since 2004. He has been tremendously supportive of the computer science program here in Qatar.”

During his visit, Dean Bryant will deliver a series of talks and a student workshop, in addition to engaging with faculty and students. The inaugural A. Nico Habermann Distinguished Lecture on “Data-Intensive Scalable Computation will present an emerging framework for collecting, organizing, and analyzing massive amounts of data. Such data are daily being produced by millions of digital devices around the world, ranging from mobile phones to weather sensors to cash registers to medical scanners, cameras and telescopes.

Oflazer explained: “Deep and timely analysis of such data with massive arrays of servers could lead to breakthroughs in business, science, and medicine. Qatar can benefit from advances in this area as it will be very dependent on the analysis of data that needs to collected in many areas such weather and air quality analysis, traffic behavior, personal health information and most importantly, gas and oil exploration.”

Having one of the first computer science departments in the United States, Carnegie Mellon brings a breadth of expertise in the field of computer science to Qatar. Benefitting from the demonstrated continual and robust growth of the high-tech sector is one of the many ways Qatar seeks to rebalance its economy away from natural resource extraction.  Carnegie Mellon’s presence in Qatar aids in this vision through its longstanding history at the forefront of innovation in the realm of computer science. 

“Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science is a top ranked learning institution for computer science research and education,” said Prof. Ilker Baybars, Dean of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. “This new lecture series in computer science offers Carnegie Mellon students and faculty, as well as the wider community in Doha, access to our scholars from the Pittsburgh campus and leading researchers and prominent figures in technology and computer science.”