Ilkay Altintas facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Ilkay Altintas
İlkay Altıntaş
Altintas in 2019
Born	İlkay Altıntaş 1977 (age 47–48) Aydın, Turkey
Citizenship	Turkey United States
Alma mater	Middle East Technical University University of Amsterdam
Known for	Kepler scientific workflow system
Scientific career
Fields	Data science Big data Workflow management Distributed computing Provenance Reproducibility
Institutions	University of California, San Diego San Diego Supercomputer Center
Thesis	Collaborative Provenance for Workflow-Driven Science and Engineering (2011)
Doctoral advisor	Peter Sloot

Ilkay Altintas is a scientist from Turkey and the United States. She works with data science and computer science. She is also a researcher in the field of supercomputing, which uses very powerful computers.

Since 2015, Altintas has been the chief data science officer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). This center is part of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She also started and leads the Workflows for Data Science Center of Excellence (WorDS) and the WIFIRE lab. Altintas helped create the Kepler scientific workflow system. This is an open-source (free to use and change) computer program that helps scientists work together and share their research.

Ilkay Altintas was born in Aydın, Turkey. She studied at Middle East Technical University. She earned her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2011 while working as a research scientist. Besides her research, she teaches computer science at the University of California, San Diego. She also helped start the Data Science Alliance, which is a nonprofit group. She advises many national groups and companies and helps edit science journals.

Education

Ilkay Altintas earned her first degree in computer engineering in 1999 from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. She then received her master's degree in computer engineering from the same university in 2001.

In 2011, she earned her PhD in computational science from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Her PhD work focused on how computer workflows can help scientists work together.

Career and Research

After finishing her master's degree in 2001, Altintas started working at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). She has held several important roles there. She was the assistant director for advanced data research and started the Scientific Workflow Automation Technologies Laboratory.

Today, she is the chief data science officer at SDSC. She also leads the Workflows for Data Science Center of Excellence (WorDS). She is the founder and director of the WIFIRE lab. The WorDS center helps people use and share computer workflow tools for many different projects. These projects include the WIFIRE lab and the Kepler scientific workflow system.

WIFIRE Lab

In 2003, Altintas saw the Cedar Fire in San Diego County, California. This huge wildfire caused a lot of damage. It made her want to improve how wildfires are managed and predicted. She spent a lot of time learning about California's fire-prone areas. She studied how weather and fuel (like dry plants) help wildfires spread.

Altintas realized that computers could model how wildfires behave. This could be done by using data from the environment. This data includes landscape information, real-time weather, camera images, and remote sensor data. This idea led her to create the WIFIRE lab.

The WIFIRE lab received money from the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2013 to 2018. It uses powerful computers and automated workflows to collect and process data. This data can then be used by many different people.

Some of the WIFIRE lab's main achievements include:

• Connecting fire science, data management, and machine learning (where computers learn from data).
• Providing real-time fire modeling services using the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN).
• Creating automated workflows and machine learning tools for fire modeling.

The WIFIRE lab now helps over 130 organizations. It combines data science and fire science to help model fires in real-time. Altintas has shared her WIFIRE research with many groups, including lawmakers in California.

The real-time fire maps from the WIFIRE lab have helped track wildfires in California. These same tools were also used to help track the COVID-19 outbreak. The real-time map helped show how the virus was spreading and how severe it was in different areas.

Because of her important work with WIFIRE, Altintas has been featured in many US radio shows, newspapers, and magazines. She has appeared in TIME magazine, National Public Radio (NPR), The New York Times, and Voice of America. She has also been featured on the University of California Television (UCTV) channel.

The Kepler Project

Altintas is one of the creators of the Kepler scientific workflow system. This is an open-source program that lets users share and work together on computer workflows for many different tasks.

The Kepler Project website lets people download the Kepler program. It also shares information about upcoming workshops, guides on how to use Kepler for various subjects (like bioinformatics), and tips for using the program effectively.

Teaching

Ilkay Altintas is a co-director for the Master of Advanced Studies in Data Science and Engineering program at UC San Diego. She also teaches in the Computer Science and Engineering Department there.

She teaches online courses about big data through Coursera and edX. She has taught over a million students through these online platforms.

Awards and Honors

• White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Invited Workshop Speaker (2016)
• Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI) Fellow, University of California, San Diego (2018)
• Pi Person of the Year, San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) (2014)
• Innovations in Networking Award for Experimental Applications, Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) (2018)
• Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing Award, Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (ACM SIGHPC) (2017)
• Peter Chen Big Data Young Researcher Award, The Services Society (2017)
• Award for Excellence for Early Career Researchers, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Technical Committee on Scalable Computing (TCSC) (2015)
• Best Workshop Paper Award for "Towards an Integrated Cyberinfrastructure for Scalable Data-Driven Monitoring, Dynamic Prediction and Resilience of Wildfires," International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS), Reykjavík, Iceland (2015)
• Editor's Choice Awards, HPCwire (2014)
  • Best Application of Big Data in HPC
  • Best Data-Intensive System (End User focused)
• Reader's Choice Award for Best Application of Big Data in HPC, HPCwire (2014)

See also

• List of female scientists in the 21st century
• List of Middle East Technical University alumni
• List of University of Amsterdam alumni