Professor Turkiyyah's expertise lies in high-performance and GPU computing, numerical simulation and optimization and their application to machine learning and large-scale modeling.
Biography
George Turkiyyah is a research professor in the Applied Mathematics and Computational Science program at KAUST.
Before joining KAUST, he was a professor at the American University of Beirut, where he also served as chair of the computer science department. Prior to joining AUB, he was an assistant professor and later an associate professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Turkiyyah earned a Bachelor of Engineering (B.Eng.) in civil and environmental engineering from the American University of Beirut, and both a Master of Science (M.S.) and a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in computer-aided engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
Turkiyyah has been involved in the development of knowledge-based AI systems that have been deployed in practice. He has also developed several widely used simulation codes for high-resolution finite element engineering applications. His work on fast methods for surgical simulation has led to a software startup and several patents.
His research has earned several awards, including the Transportation Research Board K.B. Woods Award in 2003 for best paper in design and construction, the Best Presentation Award at the ACM Solid and Physical Modeling Conference in 2007, and the Best Poster Award at the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality Conference in 2006.
He chaired the 2003 ASCE Engineering Mechanics Conference and co-chaired the Eighth ACM Symposium on Solid Modeling and Applications (SPM) in 2003. He is a member of ACM and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).
Research Interests
Professor Turkiyyah’s current research interests include hierarchically low-rank matrix algorithms and their HPC/GPU implementations to support the development of simulation models at extreme scales.
His work addresses various applications of hierarchical matrix technology, including PDE-constrained optimization, high-dimensional statistics problems, multi-dimensional fractional diffusion problems, scientific data compression and second-order methods for training neural networks.
Awards and Distinctions
- First place in Lebanese Microsoft "Imagine Cup'' Software Competition, (Team Coach), 2011
- Best Presentation Award, ACM Symposium on Solid and Physical Modeling, 2007
- Best Poster, Medicine Meets Virtual Reality' Conference, 2006
- Chair of the 16th ASCE Engineering Mechanics Conference, 2003
- Co-Chair of the 8th ACM Symposium on Solid Modeling and Applications, 2003
- TRB K.B. Woods Award for the outstanding paper published in the field of design and construction of transportation facilities, 2002
Education
- Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
- Computer-aided Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, United States, 1990
- Master of Science (M.S.)
- Computer-aided Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, United States, 1986
- Bachelor of Engineering (B.Eng.)
- Civil and Environmental Engineering, American University of Beirut, Lebanon, 1984