Pavlos Protopapas
Dr. Protopapas is a senior scientist and project manager/lead investigator of the Time Series Center at Harvard's Initiative for Innovative Computing (IIC). He is also a research scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
After serving the Cypriot military for 2.5 years where he got the worse soldier of NATO award he went to England to study physics with full scholarship at the Imperial College. He received his BSc in Physics in 1990.
He received his PhD in 1996 at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) in theoretical nuclear physics under the supervision of Prof. Abraham Klein. His thesis provided a solution to the Coriolis attenuation problem, an unsolved problem of quantum pairing known in superconductivity and nuclear structure for over 40 years. He subsequently worked with Prof. Ralph Amado on the non-linear dynamics of skyrmions of meson fields.After that he was the associate director of the National Scalable Cluster Project (NSCP), collaboration between the University of Maryland, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and University of Pennsylvania. The project was one of the initial attempts at large scale distributing computing on a grid-like model. Dr. Protopapas's group won best application for 3 years in a row at the Supercomputing Conference. At NSCP Dr. Protopapas worked on various computational projects like the Next Linear Collider. His major contribution, however, was the creation of the National Digital Mammography Archive (NDMA). IBM has since been successfully commercializing NDMA.
After the completion of the technology transfer for NDMA in 2001 Dr. Protopapas started working with Prof. Charles Alcock in large databases and data mining in astronomy. He believes that astronomy has become a computational science and his research into astronomical phenomena draws from computer science. His research interests in astronomy are in gravitational lensing, extra solar planets and the outer solar system.
He is a member of the outer solar system team for Pan-STARRS and of the data pipeline team on the TAOS project (which is searching for occultations of stars by KBOs). At the IIC he directs the work of an interdisciplinary team of astronomers, statisticians, and computer scientists on the cataloging and finding of interesting phenomena in what will become the largest collection of light curves in the world. His computer science research interests are in machine learning and data mining, especially in feature extraction, anomaly detection, and similarity searches in time series.He recovers from having been morphed into an astronomer by playing and coaching soccer. He is a licensed soccer coach and he claims that he never missed a world cup game since World Cup in Spain in 1982. He is also a recreational runner and he hopes one day he will run the Boston Marathon.
Last Updated at: 2007-09-29 01:48 PM.