S. Kamal Abdali - Short Bio

S. Kamal Abdali -- Short Bio

S Kamal Abdali

I received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1974. I started out my academic career as Assistant Professor in the computer science department of New York University. (This department is part of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciencei.) I then worked as Assisitant Professor, and later Associate Professor, of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I have also been Adjunct Professor of computer science at the Oregon Graduate Institute (now part of the Oregon Health and Science University) and the University of Delaware.

After spending 10 years in academia, I moved to industrial R&D. I was a Principal Scientist at the Computer Research Lab in Tektronix, Inc., and led the symbolic computation research group there.

Then I moved to the US federal government. I served the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in various positions in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate. These positions included Program Director for Numeric, Symbolic and Geometric Computation, and Division Director of the Computing and Communication Foundations division.

While at NSF, I represented CISE in, established, or led, a number of NSF-wide and interagency initiatives, including the Challenges series of programs, Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence, Problem Solving Environments, Cyber Trust, Computational Algorithms and Representations for Geometric Objects, Nanoscale Science and Engineering, and Software and Tools for High-End Computing.

At a gate of knowledge

While on leave from NSF, I served as a Visiting Scholar at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department of the University of California Berkeley.

Upon retirement from NSF (after 17 years of service), I joined the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), and worked as a Scientific Programme Officer in its directorate of Information and Communication Technology.

I am now officially retired, but continue professional activities and consulting work. Currently I am serving as Senior Advisor to the newly established National Research Foundation of UAE.

My research has spanned the combinatory and lambda calculi, programming language semantics, and computer algebra language and system design. My current interests include high performance computing, geographical information systems, symbolic and algebraic computation, computer algebra systems, and automated theorem proving.