Professor Jignesh M. Patel

A Professor of Computer Science in the Database Group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998. He was a faculty member at the University of Michigan from 1999?2008, and joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008. He works in the area of large-scale data management and cloud computing. He is also the founder of Locomatix, which was named the 20 hottest startup by MobileBeat, in 2010 and highlighted in the Innovation Showcase at CTIA. Locomatix, called ?location aware services,? is a technology that goes beyond the concept of GPS, or global positioning systems, and gives users access to exact locations of moving targets. With the proliferation of cell phones, technology advances such as iPhones, and the mushrooming use of social networks such as Twitter, he is quoted as saying, ?There is a tremendously large volume of data that?s constantly changing; a virtual cloud of information that is floating around us. Locomatix has developed a way to sort that data by time and location, pulling out the information that is relevant to the user.? Among the many publications he has co-authored, the most recent include: "Energy Management for MapReduce Clusters", PVLDB 3(1): 129?139, ISSN 2150-8097, with Willis Lang (2010); "A comparison of join algorithms for log processing in MapReduce", ACM SIGMOD, ISBN 978-1-4503-0032-2 with Spyros Blanas, Vuk Ercegovac, Jun Rao, Eugene J. Shekita and Yuanyuan Tian (2010); and ?Wimpy Node Clusters: What About Non-Wimpy Workloads??, with Willis Lang, and Srinath Shankar (2010). He is a 2011 recipient of a Distinguished Scientist award by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The Distinguished Member Grade ACM Award recognizes those ACM members with at least 15 years of professional experience and 5 years of continuous Professional Membership who have achieved significant accomplishments or have made a significant impact on the computing field.