Dean Amitabh Varshney

Amitabh Varshney is Dean of the College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences, and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland at College Park. He received a B. Tech. in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Research Interests:

• Augmented and Virtual Reality
• 3D Computer Graphics and Scientific Visualization
• Molecular Graphics, High-Performance Computing, Computational Geometry

Varshney's research focus is on exploring the applications of high-performance computing and visualization in engineering, science, and medicine. He has worked on a number of research areas including visual saliency, summarization of large visual datasets, and visual computing for big data. He is currently exploring applications of virtual and augmented reality in several applications, including healthcare and telemedicine. He has previously worked on the design and implementation of virtual walkthroughs of proposed structures, such as buildings, automobiles, and submarines. In the process he has developed new algorithms for automatically generating multiresolution object hierarchies, image-based rendering, parallel computation and simplification of radiosity meshes, and fine gesture recognition for virtual environments. His work on efficient and robust computation of smooth molecular surfaces is useful in the rational drug design process through the protein folding and docking problems. He is currently exploring applications in general-purpose high-performance parallel computing using clusters of CPUs and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). He has also consulted and collaborated with the industry including NVIDIA, Honda, IBM, Daimler Chrysler, General Dynamics, and Reuters. Varshney received a NSF CAREER Award in 1995 and a Honda Research Initiation Award in 1997. He received the IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement Award in 2004. He is a Fellow of IEEE.