CV
Bio: Dr. Renato J. Figueiredo is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida, where he leads research on distributed systems and cyberinfrastructure (CI). His main interests are in resource virtualization techniques applied across the continuum from edge to cloud computing, and their use as foundations for CI supporting interdisciplinary team-science to advance solutions to pressing issues in the environment and society, in particular freshwater resources and biodiversity.
His core work in computer systems has led to contributions to virtual machines, storage, and networks, with over 150 publications in conferences, workshops and journals that include two best paper awards and one of the 22 best papers of the ACM HPDC Symposium (selected for the conference’s 20-year celebration in 2012). In addition to publications, his work has also led to contributions in software and systems artifacts with broad applications, including his early career role as cyberinfrastructure Co-PI at UF in the NSF-funded nanoHUB nanotechnology portal hosted at Purdue (2004-2007), the In-VIGO project at UF (2002-2009), and the multi-institution FutureGrid CI (2009-2013). In a currently-funded project, his team leads the development of EdgeVPN, an open-source virtual network supported by the NSF CSSI Software Elements program supporting research in edge computing, with potential applications including AI-based inference at the edge.
His research and development in systems has also led to successful interdisciplinary collaborations with researchers in natural science domains on topics of increasing impact to society. The natural sciences are being transformed by an increasing variety, velocity and volume of data streaming from sensors and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, and there is a growing need to extract information from these data in real-time to enable new applications to significantly increase predictive capacity that is required for effective decision-making to mitigate changes in ecosystems. Two key highlights of his interdisciplinary work: he currently is the lead cyberinfrastructure PI in an NSF-funded award for FLARE (a near-term ecological forecasting project with applications to drinking water lakes and reservoirs, in collaboration with Virginia Tech and Cary Institute) and senior personnel in the CI team of iDigBio (Integrated Digitized Biocollections, the main US aggregator of digitized vouchered biodiversity specimens from US-based natural history museums, also funded by the NSF since 2011). Dr. Figueiredo is also a steering committee member of iDigBio and Co-PI in an NSF RCN on cross-scale processes impacting biodiversity.
His interdisciplinary collaborations have also included international projects. Figueiredo was Co-PI and steering committee member in the NSF-funded PRAGMA project (2012-2019), a project fostering interdisciplinary collaboration among CI and domain scientists across US and Pacific Rim institutions.
Figueiredo graduated with a Ph.D. in ECE from Purdue University in 2001, joined Northwestern University as an Assistant Professor in 2001, and subsequently the ECE Department at the University of Florida as an Assistant Professor in 2002. He was a sabbatical visiting researcher in the CS department at Vrije Universiteit (the Netherlands) in 2012-2013, and was promoted to Full Professor at UF in 2015. His research has been funded by government and industry sponsors; he has served as PI/Co-PI/senior personnel in over 50 awards that include the National Science Foundation, Intel Corp., IBM Corp., NOAA, DOE, and NASA. He has also served as Technical Program Committee Co-Chair for the International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC, 2010) and the International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC, 2013), and site co-director of the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) for Cloud and Autonomic Computing (CAC).