Ilkay Altintas, Ph.D

Roles

• Chief Data Science Officer - SDSC
• Division Director - Cyberinfrastructure and Convergence Research (CICORE)
• Founding Faculty Fellow - Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute
• Founder and Director - Workflows for Data Science (WorDS) Center of Excellence
• Founder and Director - WIFIRE Lab
• Co-Founder and Director - Prowess Center
• Associate Director for Education - The Eric & Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship
• Faculty C0-Director - Master of Advanced Study in Data Science and Engineering

Biography

Dr. İlkay Altıntaş is the Chief Data Science Officer (CDSO) of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) as well as a Founding Faculty Fellow of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute. She is also the Director of Cyberinfrastructure and Convergence Research Division (CICORE), as a part of the executive team providing strategic and operational leadership to SDSC. As SDSC’s inaugural CDSO, she plans and oversees a broad range of data science research, development and education activities at SDSC and works as a bridge to SDSC’s cross-sector campus, national and global collaborators and partners. In addition to her administrative duties at SDSC, Dr. Altintas is a tenured Research Scientist and has significant research and education activities in this role. She is the Founding Director of the Workflows for Data Science (WorDS) Center of Excellence and the Founding Director of the WIFIRE Lab. The WoRDS Center specializes in the development of methods, cyberinfrastructure, and workflows for computational data science and its translation to practical applications. The WIFIRE Lab focuses on methods for all-hazards knowledge from data collection to modeling efforts, and has achieved significant success in helping to manage wildfires. Altıntaş also holds a joint appointment at Los Alamos National Lab. She served as a Member of the Founding Boards of two community-oriented non-profits — “Data Science Alliance” and “Climate and Wildfire Institute”. Among the awards she has received are the 2015 IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing for Early Career Researchers and the 2017 ACM SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing Award. Altıntaş holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Ilkay serves on the elected Board of Governors for the IEEE Computer Society, and was appointed by California Governor Newsom to the Wildfire Technology Research and Development Review Advisory Board.

Expertise

• Scientific workflows
• Big Data applications
• Distributed computing
• Reproducible science
• Kepler Scientific Workflow System

Current Projects

• National Data Platform - A federated and extensible data ecosystem to promote collaboration, innovation and equitable use of data on top of existing cyberinfrastructure capabilities.
• Wildfire Commons - Designed to accelerate technological innovations for open collaborations with the goal of a wildfire-resilient future.
• UC Climate Action Seed Grant - Support electric utilities and disadvantaged communities to make distribution networks resilient against climate change.
• BurnPro3D - Designed for use in fire mitigation by land managers and burn bosses to prioritize land for treatment, and plan and conduct prescribed burns.
• Fire Integrated Real-Time Intelligence System - Provides real-time intelligence data and analysis on emerging disaster incidents in California.
• CORE Institute - Designed to catalyze an impact network of researchers and practitioners committed to collaboratively engaging in convergence research that is driven by a specific and compelling societal problem and requires deep integration across disciplines and sectors.
• Quantum Data Hub - Large scale storage capabilities for quantum-scale research.