About the Speakers

Konstantin Läufer is a full professor of computer science at Loyola University Chicago. He majored in physics at the University of Konstanz, Germany, and attended Rutgers University, New Jersey, as an exchange student. Prior to joining Loyola in 1992, he earned a PhD in computer science from the Courant Institute at New York University under the supervision of Benjamin F. Goldberg and Martin Odersky (the creator of Scala).

Konstantin’s research and teaching interests include programming languages, software architecture, distributed and pervasive computing systems, and data engineering, as well as applications in environmental sustainability and other areas of social justice. He has over 30 years of teaching experience, ranging from introductory courses to advanced courses in his research areas to tutorials on Scala at SIGCSE and SYCL/oneAPI at eScience 2023. Konstantin is affiliated with the Software and Systems Laboratory (SSL), an environment for computer systems and applied software engineering research. His research has been funded by government agencies and corporations. Konstantin is a co-inventor on two patents owned by Lucent Technologies, where he was a research consultant (1996-2000). See Konstantin’s Google Scholar for additional details.

George K. Thiruvathukal is a full professor and chairperson (2022-present) of the Department of Computer Science at Loyola University Chicago, as well as a visiting computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory in the Leadership Computing Facility. George double-majored in computer science and physics and a minor (almost major but not quite) in mathematics at Lewis University in Romeoville, IL in 1988. He earned a PhD in computer science from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1995 under the supervision of Thomas W. Christopher. His doctoral work involved the creation of messaging middleware to support parallel and distributed computation on computing clusters and networks of workstations (mostly in C/C++ and Java). He was a postdoctoral researcher at Argonne National Laboratory, where he worked on grid computing (Globus) and Message Passing Interface (MPI) for the grid with Ian Foster, Bill Gropp, and Rusty Lusk.

Apart from academic life, George held full-time positions in industry after completing his PhD qualifying exam. He was a member of technical staff at Tellabs from 1991-1993 and senior member of technical staff at R.R. Donnelley and Sons Technical Center from 1993-1995. He also served as senior member of technical staff and development manager at R.R. Donnelley and Sons Metromail Division (now Experian) from 1995-1996.

George’s research and teaching interests include high-performance computing and distributed systems, operating systems, programming languages, software engineering, machine learning, and computer vision. He is also interested in interdisciplinary computing and work in computational science, data science, digital humanities, music, social sciences, and neuroscience. He has over 30 years of teaching experience, ranging from introductory courses to advanced courses in his research areas to tutorials on Scala at SIGCSE and SYCL/oneAPI at eScience 2023. George’s recent body of work is primarily in the areas of energy-efficient computer vision and empirical software engineering. His research has been funded by government agencies, including NSF, DARPA, NSA, and NEH. He has also received research- and education-related gifts from industry, including Intel, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. See George’s Google Scholar Profile for additional details.