George Turkiyyah is Research Professor of Applied Mathematics and Computational Science at KAUST. He served as chair of the Computer Science department at the American University of Beirut (AUB) during 2010-2013. He obtained his MS and PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and his BE from AUB. Prior to joining AUB, he was at the University of Washington. His research interests are in numerical simulation, numerical optimization, high-performance computing, and geometric modeling. He has developed a number of 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 his work on geometric representation technologies has led to a number of patents. He has won a number of awards including the 2003 Transportation Research Board K.B. Woods award for best paper in Design and Construction, best presentation/poster awards in the 2007 ACM Solid and Physical Modeling and the 2006 Medicine Meets Virtual reality conferences.  He chaired the 2003 ASCE Engineering Mechanics Conference and co-chaired SPM 03, the eighth ACM Symposium on Solid Modeling and Applications. He is a member of ACM and SIAM. 

Research Interest

  • ​Numerical simulation and optimization
  • High performance
  • Scientific computing
  • Real-time physical simulation
  • Geometric modeling
  • Geometric design ​

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 Profile

  • Ph.D., Computer-aided Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, ​​​1990.
  • MS.,   Computer-aided Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, 1986.
  • B.E.,  Civil and Environmental Engineering, American University of Beirut, 1984.

Professional Memberships

  • Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, American University of Beirut​​, (2010–2016) 
  • Chair, Dept. of Computer Science, American University of Beirut,(2010–2013)
  • Associate Professor, American University of Beirut, (2006–2010)
  • Associate Professor, University of Washington, (1998–2005)
  • Assistant Professor, University of Washington, (1992–1998)
  • Visiting Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University,​​​​ (1990–1991)
  • ​​ACM, SIAM

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​

Selected Publications

Aldawood*, A., Alkhalifah, T., Hoteit, I., Zuberi, M., & Turkiyyah, G. (2014). The possibilities of linearized inversion of internally scattered seismic data. In SEG Technical Program Expanded Abstracts 2014. Society of Exploration Geophysicists. https://doi.org/10.1190/segam2014-0497.1
Handle
10754/555874
DOI
10.1190/segam2014-0497.1
Altmetrics
Chávez, G., Turkiyyah, G., Zampini, S., & Keyes, D. (2018). Parallel accelerated cyclic reduction preconditioner for three-dimensional elliptic PDEs with variable coefficients. Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, 344, 760–781. doi:10.1016/j.cam.2017.11.035
Handle
10754/626377
DOI
10.1016/j.cam.2017.11.035
Altmetrics
Genton, M. G., Keyes, D. E., & Turkiyyah, G. (2018). Hierarchical Decompositions for the Computation of High-Dimensional Multivariate Normal Probabilities. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 27(2), 268–277. doi:10.1080/10618600.2017.1375936
Handle
10754/625457
DOI
10.1080/10618600.2017.1375936
Altmetrics
Chávez, G., Turkiyyah, G., Yokota, R., Keyes, D. E. (2014). Hierarchical matrix techniques for the solution of elliptic equations, SHAXC-2 Workshop 2014. https://hdl.handle.net/10754/624934
Handle
10754/624934
M. F. A. Ahmed, T. Y. Al-Naffouri, M.-S. Alouini, and G. Turkiyyah, “The Effect of Correlated Observations on the Performance of Distributed Estimation,” IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, vol. 61, no. 24, pp. 6264–6275, Dec. 2013.
DOI
10.1109/tsp.2013.2283841
Altmetrics