Team Roster and Duties
Dr. Ke-Thia Yao will be the Principal Investigator and he will act as the system designer and
implement his distributed data management system
.
Dr. Pedro Diniz will head up the hardware acceleration effort: FPGA and GPGPU
conceptualization and execution.
One GRA will assist Dr. Diniz in FPGA programming and system analysis.
Dr. Jacqueline Chame will lead the effort for Domain Specific Language and compiler research and
implementation.
Dr. Sergio Bioxio will work to provide D-Wave Quantum Computer operations and interfaces
One GRA will assist Dr. Bioxio in interface programming and system analysis.
Dr. Federico Spedaliari will provide application porting and implementation on the D-Wave
computer.
Gene Wagenbreth will contribute GPGPU programming and HPC implementations.
Craig Ward will work on database and distributed data management programming.
Dan Davis will take the lead on reporting, organizing and producing publications, providing Military
Intelligence contextual advice and applications, and generating the project web applications.
Team Qualifications
Dr. Ke-Thia Yao has a B.S. from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MS & PhD from
Rutgers University; he has been a Project Leader and Scientist at ISI for 25 years.
Dr. Pedro Diniz has an M.S. from the Technical University of Lisbon, and a PhD UC Santa
Barbara; he has been a Researcher and Research Professor at USC for 15 years.
He will be assisted by one GRA, TBD, PhD candidate, Viterbi School of Engineering, USC
Dr. Jacqueline Chame has a B.S. and an M.S. from Pontificia Universidade Catolica, Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil, and a PhD from USC, she has been a Research Scientist at ISI for 10 years.
Dr. Sergio Bioxio got his Undergraduate Degree from Compulatense in Madrid, and his M.S and
PhD from UNED Madrid, Spain.
He will be assisted by one GRA,TBD, PhD candidate, Viterbi School of Engineering, USC
Dr. Federico Spedaliari received his Undergraduate training at the University of Buenos Aires, and a
PhD from Caltech; he has been engaged in Quantum Programming for 10 years.
Gene Wagenbreth received a BS in CS & Math from the University of Illinois and he has been
actively engaged in HPC programming for 40 years.
Craig Ward earned a BS from UC Irvine and then an MS CS from Loyola Marymount; he has been
performing database programming for 20 years.
Dan Davis earned both his BA & a JD from the University of Colorado, Boulder, he is a
Commander, USN-Ret and has been active in HPC research for 20 years and had a Military
Intelligence career that spanned 24 years.
Paragraph Description of Organization
The ISI Team is an experienced research team, with more than a decade of experience working on
large DoD projects together. They are not an ad hoc team of researchers assembled just for this
project. They will be led by the Principal Investigator (PI) Dr. Ke-Thia Yao, who is a Research
Scientist and Project Leader at USC's ISI. He is a widely published author and lecturer on data
management and teaches an undergraduate course on the topic at USC. Within the JESPP project he
is developing a distributed data management system, the Scalable Data Grid, and a suite of
monitoring, logging and analysis tools to help users better understand the computational and
behavioral properties of large-scale simulations. He received his B.S. degree in EECS from UC
Berkeley, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Rutgers University.
He will be assisted by four experienced research scientist from ISI: Dr. Pedro Diniz, whose expertise
is in FPGA applications to analyze large data sets, Dr. Jacqueline Chame, whose expertise is in
compiler design to support Domain Specific Languages, Dr. Sergio Bioxo, who is one of the key
researchers on the D-Wave quantum computing project at USC and Dr. Federico Spedalieri who is
bridging the gap between adiabatic computing and applications. They, in turn, will be supported by
the Messers Gene Wagenbreth and Craig Ward, both experienced High Performance Computing
(HPC) and distributed database programmers and by CDR Dan Davis, who will be responsible to
the PI for documentation, progress reporting, web-site, and military intelligence issues.
Of these, Dr. Yao and Mr. Wagenbreth hold current TS/SCI clearance, CDR Davis is currently
cleared to the TS level, and has held three SCI tickets in the past, and Mr. Ward holds a current
Secret Clearance. Further, the facility where the bulk of the research will be done has an area
certified to the SCI level. The Doctors Yao, Diniz, Chame and Bioxo are all considered key to the
project. All of the team members are widely published in the fields indicated in the paragraph
above. Experience levels are all demonstrable and exceptional, e.g. Gene Wagenbreth has been
doing HPC programming for four decades (since beginning on the ILLIAC IV) and CDR Davis has
a 24-year career as a cryptographic linguist, analyst and intelligence manager in the Naval Services.
The key personnel all have more than two decades experience in their respective fields. With the
exception of the PI, the staff will all contribute on the order of 800 hours per year to this project.
CDR Davis will lead the drafting of the Project Communications Plan and create a web page with
interactive capabilities for insuring the coordination of the team, the dissemination of data, the
preparation of progress reports and the complete visibility of the research to the Program Manager
at DARPA. The Team has effectively used this system in the past and found it intuitive, useful and
conducive to good administration of the research.
M&S – This project should require no special material or supplies. A standard charge for typical
office and computer consumables should be sufficient.
Travel – The BAA specifically calls for the PI to make quarterly trips to DC and for the project to
provide a “representative” in the Northern Virginia area for ten weeks each year between June and
September. Dr. Yao will make the quarterly trips to DC and Dan Davis will relocate to DC each
summer for the “representative” duty. The BAA also alludes to, but does not specifically require
travel to present papers. One trip per year to appropriate conferences is suggested for each
professional.
Short Bios
Dr. Thia Yao is a project leader and research scientist at the University of Southern California
Information Sciences Institute. His research has been centered on distributed data management on
the CiSoft and the JESPP projects, which have the goals of effectively managing large and
heterogeneous databases that originate from and are use by diverse entities in dispersed location
supporting very large-scale distributed industrial and military organizations, involving millions of
autonomous agent entities. He is a widely published author and lecturer on data management and
teaches an undergraduate course on the topic at USC. He has developed a suite of monitoring,
logging, and analysis tools to help users better understand the computational and behavioral
properties of large-scale simulations and operation. He has conceived, designed and implemented
the Scalable Data Grid for distributed data management of large archives. He received his B.S.
degree in EECS from the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in
Computer Science from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Dr. Pedro Diniz has been researcher since 1997 with the University of Southern California’s
Information Sciences Institute as a computational scientist and as a Research Assistant Professor of
Computer Science at the Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California in Los
Angeles, California. In 2007 he joined the Technical University of Lisbon and is currently Associate
Professor with the Department of Engineering Informatics (DEI). He has graduated 3 PhD
students while at USC and authored or co-authored 12 internationally recognized scientific journal
papers and over 50 international conference papers. He has participated in many scientific proposal
review boards at the National Science Foundation and as part of the NPACI national resource
allocation committee and is heavily involved in the scientific community having participated as part
of the technical program committee of over 15 international conferences in the area of highperformance computing, reconfigurable and field-programmable computing. Dr. Diniz received his
M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Technical University in Lisbon, Portugal and
his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in Computer Science in 1997.
Dr. Jacqueline Chame is a research scientist at the Information Sciences Institute within the
Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California. Her area of study has been
compiler design. She is widely published and well known in the compiler research community.
She received a B.S. and an M.S. from Pontificia Universidade Catolica, Rio de Janeiro and earned her
PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southern California.
Dr. Sergio Boixo is a Computer Scientist and Quantum Computing Engineer at the Computational
Sciences Division of the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (ISI), and
a Harvard Associate. Dr. Boixo has over nine years of experience in quantum computation research,
and over six years of experience developing software solutions in industry. He is an author of over
25 highly-cited publications in world-class journals. Dr. Boixo received his M.S. at the Universidad
Autonoma de Barcelona and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics, with Honors, at the University of New
Mexico (2008), while also conducting research at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Among other
awards, Dr. Boixo received a prestigious “La Caixa” Fellowship in 2004. He was a postdoctoral
scholar at Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information (2009-10), and at the University of Harvard
(2010-11). Dr. Boixo also holds undergraduate degrees in Computer Engineering (Complutense,
Madrid), Mathematics (UNED, Madrid) and Philosophy (UNED, Madrid). He has been an IT
consultant in Germany, Switzerland and Spain.
Dr. Federico Spedalieri is a Computer Scientist at the Information Sciences Institute. He has over
10 years of experience in the area of Quantum Information and Quantum Computation. He has
worked on the characterization of entangled states, devising a numerical test that is widely used to
decide whether a given state is entangled (these results, published in Physical Review Letters and
Physical Review A has been cited more than 200 times). He has also worked on implementations of
quantum computing using linear optics, devised a protocol that exploits orbital angular momentum
states of photons to implement quantum key distribution, and has designed a low latency
implementation of fault-tolerant quantum computing suited for planar architectures with local
interactions. Currently, he is working to bridge the gap between the adiabatic quantum computing
model (and its incarnation in the form of the adiabatic quantum computer D-Wave One) and
applications to many different fields, such as model checking, natural language processing,
scheduling and planning, complex system design, and many others. He has a Ph.D. in Physics from
the California Institute of Technology and a degree of Licenciado en Ciencias Fisicas from the
University of Buenos Aires.
Gene Wagenbreth is a Systems Analyst for Parallel Processing at the Information Sciences Institute
at the University of Southern California, doing research in the Computational Sciences Division.
Prior positions have included Vice President and Chief Architect of Applied Parallel Research and
Lead Programmer of Pacific Sierra Research, where he specialized in tools for distributed and shared
memory parallelization of Fortran programs. He has also been active in benchmarking, optimization
and porting of software for private industry and government labs. He has programmed on CRAY,
SGI, Hitachi, Fujitsu, NEC, networked PCs, networked workstations, IBM SP2, as well as
conventional machines. He received a BS in Math/Computer Science from the University of Illinois
in 1971.
Craig E. Ward is a Parallel Computer Systems Analyst at the Information Sciences Institute. Much
of his recent research has focused on large-scale data management in the defense and the health
sectors. His concentration has been on open source tools. Previously, he performed computer
analysis for law enforcement in California. He has a B.A. in History from the University of
California, Irvine, and an M.S. in Computer Science from Loyola Marymount University in Los
Angeles California.
Dan M. Davis was the Director, JESPP Project, ISI at USC and has been active in large-scale
distributed simulations for the DoD since 1992, first at Caltech, then at the Maui High Performance
Computing Center and now at ISI. He was the Assistant Director of CACR at Caltech, managing
the Synthetic Forces Express simulation project which brought High Performance Computing to
DoD simulations. Prior to that, he was a Software Engineer on an intelligence data fusion program,
the All Source Analysis System project, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He came there from work
on a classified intelligence sensor project at Martin Marietta, Denver. Dan has served 24 years
service as an intelligence officer. An active duty Marine Cryptologist, he served two combat tours as
a Cryptologic linguist and intelligence analyst. Having later served as a cryptologist at NSA and in
Asia and Europe, he was the commanding officer of two Naval Security Group units and he retired
as a Commander, USNR, Cryptologic Specialty. He has served as the Chairman of the Coalition of
Academic Supercomputing Centers and the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation. Widely
published, he has authored six journal articles and 34 conference papers on the use of High
Performance Computing for defense research, training and educational purposes. He received a B.A.
and a J.D., both from the University of Colorado in Boulder.