Ali Butt
BLACKSBURG, Va., Sept. 23, 2010 – Ali Butt, an assistant professor with the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech’s computer science department, is helping spearhead this week’s National Academy of Engineering’s 16th annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium.
An attendee at the 2009 event, Butt is serving as an organizer for this year’s symposium. It will be held today through Saturday at the IBM Learning Center in Armonk, N.Y., and will examine cloud computing, autonomous aerospace systems, engineering and music, and engineering inspired by biology.
Eighty-six of the nation’s brightest young engineers have been invited to attend the symposium from over 265 applicants, the participants highlight the exceptional engineering research and technical work being conducted in industry, academia, and government across a wide variety of disciplines, according to organizers.
Butt is hosting a session on cloud computing, a continually emerging paradigm in the computer science field for providing computing resources for enterprise, academic and scientific communities. His research focuses on addressing the performance gap between computing power and storage technology for high performance computing environments. He also has been recognized for outstanding research potential though a 2008 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Development (CAREER) award.
Several Virginia Tech College of Engineering faculty members are attending this year’s event, including Dennis Hong, associate professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory, and Leigh McCue-Weil, an assistant professor in the department of aerospace and ocean engineering, and Annie Pearce, an assistant professor with the Myers-Lawson School of Construction. Last year, Naren Ramakrishnan, also a professor of computer science at Virginia Tech, was one of the organizers of 15th annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium.
Before joining the Virginia Tech faculty in 2006, Butt completed his doctorate in electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University. He received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore, Pakistan.
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