1/13/2010
Written by
University of Illinois computer science professor Tarek Abdelzaher has been named a Donald Biggar Willet Scholar in the College of Engineering. The selective Willet Scholar award is given to young faculty members in the College of Engineering who are excelling in their academic endeavors.
Abdelzaher received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt, in 1990 and 1994 respectively. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1999 on Quality of Service Adaptation in Real-Time Systems. He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia, where he founded the Software Predictability Group, before joining the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science in 2005.
Abdelzaher’s research interests are in cyber-physical computing, wireless sensor networks, ubiquitous computing, and embedded and real-time systems.
“An expanding frontier for computer scientists lies at the intersection of the logical and physical realms,” says Abdelzaher. “As computing elements become embedded more pervasively in our environment, a new cyber-physical fabric arises in which logical processing is very deeply intertwined with the distributed physical environment in which it occurs. Computing becomes less obtrusive and a more natural part of the external world.”
One of Abdelzaher’s current research activities is developing a novel navigation service, called Green GPS, to help drivers make informed fuel-saving decisions. Green GPS uses sensors and GPS to map vehicular fuel consumption on city streets, allowing drivers to find the most fuel-efficient routes for their vehicles between arbitrary end-points. Green GPS relies on data collected by individuals from their vehicles as well as on mathematical models that are developed in Abdelzaher’s lab to compute fuel efficient routes.
Abdelzaher has authored/coauthored three book chapters and more than 60 refereed publications in leading conferences and journals in several fields including real-time computing, distributed systems, sensor networks, and control. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Real-Time Systems, an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, the ACM Transaction on Sensor Networks, the International Journal of Embedded Systems and the Ad Hoc Networks Journal, as well as Editor of ACM SIGBED Review. He was Guest Editor for the Journal of Computer Communications and the Journal of Real-Time Systems, and is Co-Editor of IEEE Distributed Systems Online. He served on numerous technical program committees in real-time computing, networking, quality of service, distributed systems, sensor networks, multimedia, and mobile computing, among others.