Vipin Kumar

Vipin Kumar is a Regents Professor and William Norris Endowed Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He leads the CSE Data Science Initiative and has held roles such as Department Head (2005–2015) and Director of the Army High Performance Computing Research Center (1998–2005). His research focuses on data mining, high-performance computing, climate science, and environmental applications.

Education:

• B.E., Electronics & Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (1977)
• M.E., Electronics Engineering, Philips International Institute, Netherlands (1979)
• Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park (1982)

Research Interests: Kumar pioneers Knowledge-Guided Machine Learning (KGML) for environmental science, climate change analysis, and global ecosystem monitoring. His work integrates computational methods with domain knowledge to address challenges in agriculture, hydrology, and climate modeling. Key contributions include scalable algorithms (e.g., METIS, PSPASES) and frameworks for big data-driven discovery.

Publications: Over 300 articles and 10 books, including seminal works like Introduction to Parallel Computing and Introduction to Data Mining. Recent efforts focus on applying machine learning to monitor global change and predict environmental phenomena like floods, carbon cycles, and lake temperatures.

Scientific Awards:

• ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award (2012)
• IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award (2016)
• NSF Expeditions in Computing Grant (Climate Change Project)
• Fellowships: ACM, IEEE, SIAM, AAAS

Advising & Grants: Advisor to over 50 graduate students (listed in full description). Principal Investigator of major grants including NSF BIGDATA, NSF INFEWS, and DARPA World Modeler initiatives. Leads interdisciplinary teams on projects like the Global Observatory for Planetary Health and Ecosystem Resources (GOPHER).

Labs/Teams: Director of GOPHER, a multi-institutional effort to monitor Earth’s ecosystems using AI and satellite data. Active in initiatives like the Climate Change Data Expedition and the Data Science Leadership Summit.