E.N. (Mootaz) Elnozahy is currently a Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical, and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering division (CEMSE) at KAUST.  He's been at KAUST since 2013 initially serving as the Dean of the CEMSE division for 8 years, then as a Special Advisor to the university President for one year.

Prior to arriving at KAUST, Prof. Mootaz worked for 15 years at IBM Research in Austin, TX and as an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas, Austin. He started his academic career as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1993 until 1997 before deciding to move back to Texas.

Prof. Mootaz's research and development work has been in the systems areas of Computer Science with various levels of expertise in computer architecture, operating systems, distributed systems, reliable computing, high performance computing, databases, and computer systems security. He has led and contributed to two dozen industry-defining computing hardware and software products with the most prominent being the PERCS project at IBM (Productive, Easy-to-use, ReliableComputing System). Other major projects include a Super Dense Server, Micro Servers for Dense Storage and Analytic Applications, Optimization to the Web Service Site of the Census Bureau, and a Compressor/Decompressor for PowerPC Binaries project.

Mootaz has filed individually, and with colleagues, 58 U.S. patents. He authored and co-authored some 50+ technical publications. Over two decades time, he has successfully secured research & development funding grants of ~$320M. 

Education and early career

Dr. Elnozahy earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Rice University, Houston, Texas. From Cairo University, Egypt, he earned a B.Sc. in electrical engineering and a Master's degree in Computer Engineering. Mootaz was nominated by his IBM mentors for leadership and management training at Harvard Business School at Harvard University and McCombs School of business at the University of Texas.

Mootaz held visiting research scientist positions at Bell Communications Research (Bellcore, NJ) and Bell Laboratories Research (Lucent Technologies, NJ).

Career recognitions

Prof. Mootaz received various recognition honors for his technical and leadership services, some are:  Fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors, IEEE fellow, Master Inventor for life at IBM, Trailblazer award from the University of Texas, Austin, several Best-paper awards, Outstanding invention award, honorary Professor from Amity University, India, Advisory board member at the University of Coimbra, Portugal and at Texas A & M University. He was honored by close to 100 Colloquia invitations around the world. He especially appreciates the honor of witnessing the success of his students and mentees.

Editorial activities

Professor Elnozahy has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Systems, and the International Journal of Security and Networks. He served as a Guest editor for the IEEE Transactions on Computers, Special Issue on Energy Efficient Computing, the IBM Journal of Research and Development, Special Issue on Low-Power Systems, and the IEEE Technical Committee on Operating Systems Newsletter.

He served as a member, co-chair, and chair for over 60 technical program committees for leading conferences in the computing systems area. 

Why computer science?

My love with computers started when my father bought me a programmable calculator in 1980. I was blown away by the ability to tell the computer to do what I tell it to do. Programming became an instant hobby. Then, I started using it to automate some of the transmission line and electrical motor computations in my electrical engineering classes, and I discovered that programmers have limitless horizons in terms of the impact that they create. It has been a life-long passion.

Why KAUST?

I visited KAUST in 2011 to interview for the dean position at the request of the then provost Professor Stefan Catsicas. Part of the visit was to visit a small museum of science in the early days of Islam. In the museum, the vision of the university founder was displayed prominently. Reading the vision, and being from this region, I felt that the king was talking to me directly. I understood immediately that the historical context of this university is a project of immense importance and the historical dimension was not lost on me. Coming out of that little museum, I told myself “this is the place I want to be”.

Education Profile

• ​​​​Ph.D., Computer Science, Rice University, USA 1993
• M.S., Computer Science, Rice University, USA 1990
• M.S., Computer Engineering, Cairo University, Egypt, 1987
• B.S., Electrical Engineering, Cairo University, Egypt, 1984​

Awards and Distinctions

• Fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors, 2021
• Elected Member, IFIP 10.4 Working Group, 2013. Chair starting 2019.
• IEEE Fellow, January 2010.
• Best Paper Award, 2nd  International Green Computing Conference, 2011.
• Best Paper Award, 8th  IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, 2005
• Trailblazer Award, University of Texas at Austin, October 2003.
• National Science Foundation CAREER award, June 1995.
• Various IBM awards including:
  • Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, IBM, PERCS Phase 3 win, Jan 2008.
  • Technical Group Award, IBM, March 2006, PERCS Phase 2 execution.
  • System and Technology Group “Master Inventor,” IBM, September 2005.
  • President Award, IBM, PERCS Phase 2 win, August 2003.
  • Outstanding Invention Award, for innovative solutions in the Bureau of Census project, May 2002.
  • Research Division Technical Group Award, IBM Research, 2000.
  • Team Award” for efforts in prototyping a Cache Coherent Non Uniform Memory Access Multiprocessor based on the Intel architecture, December 1999.
  • Research Division Award, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, October 1992, for contributions to the Highly Available Network File Server project (HANFS).
• The Ralph Budd Award for the best Ph.D. thesis in engineering, Rice University, June 1994.

Professional Memberships

Professor Elnozahy served as a member, co-chair, and chair for over 60 technical program committees for leading conferences in the computing systems area. Some are:

• IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization
• IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
• IEEE Transactions on Dependable Systems and Networks.
• ACM Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

Patents

Technology for web site crawling, including action sequences for selecting non-hypertext-link parameters

Publication number: 20130041882

TOLERATING SOFT ERRORS BY SELECTIVE DUPLICATION

Publication number: 20110296228

Data storage on a computer disk array

Publication number: 20020199129

Mechanisms for Reducing DRAM Power Consumption

Publication number: 20110296097

FAST REMOTE COMMUNICATION AND COMPUTATION BETWEEN PROCESSORS

Publication number: 20120191946

Method and system for compressing reduced instruction set computer (RISC) executable code through instruction set expansion

Patent number: 6195743

FAST REMOTE COMMUNICATION AND COMPUTATION BETWEEN PROCESSORS

Publication number: 20110296138

Method and system for address trace compression through loop detection and reduction

Patent number: 6347383

Power aware adaptive polling

Publication number: 20040123169

ACCELERATING RECOVERY IN MPI ENVIRONMENTS

Publication number: 20120226939

Measuring response time for a computer accessing information from a network

Publication number: 20020112049

Technology for web site crawling

Patent number: 9165077

Optimistic processing of network frames to reduce latency

Publication number: 20020178068

More patents by Professor Elnozahy