Boon Thau Loo is a Singaporean-American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (a ...

college administrator Academic administration is a branch of university or college employees responsible for the maintenance and supervision of the institution and separate from the faculty or academics, although some personnel may have joint responsibilities. Some t ...

, and technology entrepreneur. He is currently the RCA professor in the Computer and Information Science department at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest- ...

where he leads a research lab working on distributed systems, and serves as the Associate Dean for Graduate Programs at the

University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science The University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science, more commonly known as Penn Engineering or SEAS, is an undergraduate and graduate school of the University of Pennsylvania. The School offers programs that emphasize hands- ...

Early life

Boon Thau Loo was born in

Malaysia Malaysia ( ; ) is a country in Southeast Asia. The federal constitutional monarchy consists of thirteen states and three federal territories, separated by the South China Sea into two regions: Peninsular Malaysia and Borneo's East Mal ...

and grew up in

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, bor ...

. He studied at

The Chinese High School The Chinese High School () was an independent school in Singapore offering secondary education. The school merged with Hwa Chong Junior College on 1 January 2005 to form the integrated Hwa Chong Institution. Founded on 21 March 1919, The Chin ...

and Raffles Junior College. In 1996, he moved to the United States in order to attend the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...

, where he received an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Following his studies there, he pursued his master's degree in computer science at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

. He then returned to Berkeley for his PhD, which he graduated in 2006 with the David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize dissertation award and the 2007 ACM SIGMOD Dissertation Award for his thesis ''The Design and Implementation of Declarative Networks''. Following his studies, Loo began working as a post-doctoral researcher at

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technolog ...

Academic career

As a scholar, Loo became the RCA professor of artificial intelligence at the

in the departments of Computer and Information Science and Electrical and Systems Engineering. At Penn he is also the director of the Distributed Systems Laboratory and the NetDB@Penn research group. In 2018, he became the associate dean of master's and professional programs, where he oversees all Master's and professional programs in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. As associate dean, Loo led several new academic initiatives, such as MCIT Online, first Ivy League fully online master's degree program in computer science for non-computer science majors, the J.P. Eckert Diversity Fellowship, Cybersecurity boot camp for mid-career professionals in the Philadelphia greater area, data science boot camp, the accelerated master's program for Penn undergraduates., professional development course for all master's students in engineering, and MSE-DS Online (online Data Science master's). While serving as a researcher and professor, Loo has founded several private enterprises. He has published over 150 papers and two books - ''Declarative Networking (Synthesis Lectures on Data Management)'' in 2012 and ''Datalog and Recursive Query Processing (Foundations and Trends(r) in Databases)'' in 2013. In 2019, Loo received the University of Pennsylvania Emerging Inventor of the Year award, given annually to one Penn faculty member for success in technology transfer.. In July 2020, Loo was appointed Associate Dean for Graduate Programs, where he oversees all doctoral, master's and professional programs at Penn Engineering. As graduate dean, he launched several new initiatives, including the Dean's Doctoral Diversity Fellowship, Dean's Master's Fellowships for on-campus and online master's students, and the Master-to-Ph.D. bridge program. In 2021, Loo received the 2021 Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching, sponsored by Lutron Electronics

Business career

While on sabbatical leave from Penn in 2014, Loo cofounded and led Gencore Systems, a Penn startup company on cloud performance monitoring. Gencore Systems was one of the first faculty-led startups from Penn's Computer Science department. Leading a group of his former students that spun off the company with him, Loo formed a partnership with the OpenLab of

Juniper Networks Juniper Networks, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company develops and markets networking products, including routers, switches, network management software, network security product ...

and integrated his group's research on high-performance declarative network analytics into Juniper's newly acquired Contrail SDN platform. The company raised seed funding in addition to a SBIR (Small Business Innovative Research) grant from the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

. The company was later renamed Netsil and acquired by Nutanix in 2018 for up to US$74M in stock. At the point of acquisition, Netsil was one of the first successful faculty-led startup exits from the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science. In 2015, Loo also cofounded Termaxia, a big data storage company, where he served as Chief Scientist. In 2020, the company was acquired by Frontiir, a leading Internet company in Southeast Asia. Post acquisition, Loo currently serves as the executive adviser at Frontiir, where he advises the CEO and CTO on technology strategy, and help establish Frontiir's R&D center in Philadelphia.

Recognition

* Lindback award for Distinguished Teaching, awarded by the University of Pennsylvania, 2022 * Best paper award at the 23rd International Conference on Extending Database Technology, 30th March-2nd April, 2020 * Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program award, 2012 * ACM SIGMOD Dissertation Award, 2007 * David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize, 2006 * Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Awards (Honorable mention), 1999

References

{{reflist Living people University of Pennsylvania faculty Stanford University alumni UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni Computer scientists Malaysian company founders Malaysian non-fiction writers People from Singapore Technology writers Computer science writers Technology company founders Year of birth missing (living people)