Srinivasan Parthasarathy receives 2024 Distinguished Scholar Award
Srinivasan Parthasarathy, PhD, professor of computer science and engineering in the College of Engineering, has earned The Ohio State University 2024 Distinguished Scholar Award. Senior leadership in the Enterprise for Research, Innovation and Knowledge recently surprised Parthasarathy with the honor at a department meeting.
“I'm actually at a loss for words, but humbled and honored summarizes the emotions going through me right now,” said Parthasarathy upon learning of his award. “It may sound cliched, but it really takes a village. I am grateful to my students, collaborators and my family. It also takes the right environment. Computer science and engineering at Ohio State happened to be the right environment for me.”
Parthasarathy is a world-renowned expert and leader in data analytics, specializing in high-performance data mining, graph mining, network analysis, database management and anomaly detection.
“Dr. Parthasarathy's peers feel his work is foundational, particularly in high-performance data analytics, data mining and anomaly detection,” said Cynthia Carnes, senior associate vice president for research operations. “He has also played a critical role in bridging the gap between computer sciences and other disciplines by collaborating with experts from sociology, public health, journalism, philosophy, law and business.
“When I’m thinking about your research, it’s the fact that you were doing AI and trustworthy AI before it was popular, and I think you laid the foundation of what we can do here at Ohio State,” said College of Engineering dean Ayanna Howard. “You continue to make us proud especially as we continue to grow this area.”
Department chair Anish Arora also shared his congratulations. “Scholarship is in your blood. But it's more than that: you have always valued the balance between theory and practice. The relevance of what you are doing to solve societal challenges - in disaster response, computational chemistry, social networks and now fairness and equity - speaks to your valuing translation in a very deep way. To us, you are a role model of a computing researcher in interdisciplinary and team science.”
Parthasarathy is one of the few individuals to have received both the National Science Foundation CAREER award and the Department of Energy Early Career Principal Investigator award. Since 2000, he has received continuous funding from the NSF. He is frequently invited to speak as a keynote or an invited speaker at various conferences, symposia, and workshops of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Association for Computation Machinery (ACM), as well as academic and industrial research labs. Parthasarathy played a key role in creating Ohio State’s first undergraduate major in data analytics in 2014 and continues to serve as the founding co-director of the program. He is also a co-lead of the Community of Practice on Responsible Data Science associated with the Translational Data Analytics Institute (TDAI). In 2023, Parthasarathy was named a fellow of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers and the Asia Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association. He also received the College of Engineering’s Lumley Award in 2004 and 2010 for his research. Parthasarathy previously worked at Intel Corporation and held visiting positions at the University of Rochester and the National University of Singapore. He earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in computer science from the University of Rochester and his bachelor’s in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology.
The Distinguished Scholar Award is among the highest annual honors awarded at Ohio State. The university-level award annually honors six faculty members who demonstrate scholarly activity, conduct research or creative works that represent exceptional achievements in their fields and garner distinction for the university.
Award recipients are nominated by their departments and chosen by a committee of senior faculty, including past award recipients. Distinguished Scholars receive an honorarium and a research grant to be used over the next three years.
Quotes from Parthasarathy’s nomination:
“Srini is a leader in the space of graph mining. His work on ensemble clustering of protein networks, probabilistic link prediction, an event-based approach for analyzing dynamic networks and scalable stochastic flow clustering are foundational - each incorporates deep algorithmic insights that have influenced research worldwide and several have had definitive commercial impact…What is truly impressive is that his productivity is showing no signs of slowing down. For instance his brand new work on realizing a full-stack practical system for auditing the fairness of deployed ML models, is likely to be extremely impactful especially in light of recent governance and regulatory initiatives. ” Vipin Kumar, University of Minnesota.
“Srini’s work at the intersection of high-performance computing and data mining (broadly high performance data analytics) is foundational. His work on the ECLAT family of incremental and parallel algorithms has been highly impactful by any measure. It is widely cited, used in industry, discussed in textbooks, and taught in the classroom worldwide. He has continuously pushed the envelope in this space… His work on an event based framework for analyzing dynamic graphs is seminal. This work has subsequently influenced a wide range of research work in social network analysis, link prediction, structural role discovery, dynamic visualization and bibliometric analysis.” Christos Faloutsos, Carnegie Mellon University.
“Srini is an acknowledged superstar and leader in the high-performance data analytics space. He has authored several field-shaping ideas in this space focusing on new methods for high-performance frequent pattern mining (via the vertical representation), scalable anomaly detection, high-performance clustering, parallel graph mining and the development of graph processing tools and systems on heterogeneous platforms…His formative ideas in anomaly detection have inspired the development of predictive models for real time flood mapping and storm surge prediction which facilitates relief prioritization efforts.” Amit Sheth, University of South Carolina.