Biography

Viraj Bhat graduated with a Ph.D. degree (May 2008) in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering under the guidance of Professor, Manish Parashar. Currently he is employed with Yahoo! Santa Clara as a Grid Solutions engineer, where he works on building, porting and parallelizing several data-intensive applications on Yahoo! Grids based on Hadoop (Map Reduce Programming Paradigm). He also works on various open source projects such as Pig for analyzing large datasets.

His PhD thesis focused on Autonomic Management of Data Streaming and In-Transit Processing for Data Intensive Scientific Workflows. His research interests include Parallel and Distributed Computing, Autonomic Computing, Grid Computing, Software Engineering, and Model based Control and Optimization.

He used to be a visiting researcher at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in Princeton, New Jersey collaborating with Scott Klasky. Viraj has been involved in several research projects at Rutgers, including CORBACoG, AutoMate/Accord and DISCOVER at CAIP (Rutgers University) and Development of Systems for Distributed Scientific Data Management using Automated Workflows Applied to Plasma Physics Simulations. Prior to this he was a Software Engineer at Satyam Computer Services Ltd. in Bangalore with 2 years of industry experience in information technology, specifically in the engineering sector.

He has co-authored several technical papers in international journals and conferences, and has co-authored 2 book chapters/proceedings. Viraj was the Cyber Chair for HiPC Conference (2005-2007) and a reviewer for several journals and conferences. He is also on the Program Committee of ICDCIT 2008

Viraj received his B.E. degree (May 1998) in Electrical Engineering from NIT/REC Bhopal India, and a M.S. degree (May 2003) in Computer Engineering from Rutgers University.