Ian Tremere Foster (born 1 January 1959) is a New Zealand-American computer scientist. He is a distinguished fellow, senior scientist, and director of the Data Science and Learning division at

Argonne National Laboratory Argonne National Laboratory is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Lemont, Illinois, Lemont, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1946, the laboratory is owned by the United Sta ...

, and a professor in the department of computer science at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...

Education and career

Foster was born in

Wellington Wellington is the capital city of New Zealand. It is located at the south-western tip of the North Island, between Cook Strait and the Remutaka Range. Wellington is the third-largest city in New Zealand (second largest in the North Island ...

, New Zealand, in 1959. He was educated at Wellington College and the

University of Canterbury The University of Canterbury (UC; ; postnominal abbreviation ''Cantuar.'' or ''Cant.'' for ''Cantuariensis'', the Latin name for Canterbury) is a public research university based in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was founded in 1873 as Canterbur ...

, followed by the Department of Computing,

Imperial College London Imperial College London, also known as Imperial, is a Public university, public research university in London, England. Its history began with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, who envisioned a Al ...

. From 2006 to 2016, he was director of the Computation Institute (CI), a joint project between the

, and

. CI brings together computational scientists and discipline leaders to work on projects with computation as a key component. He is currently Director of the Data Science and Learning Division at

, a unit established to tackle advanced scientific problems where data analysis and artificial intelligence can provide critical insights and accelerate discovery.

Honors

Foster's honours include the

Gordon Bell Prize The Gordon Bell Prize is an award presented by the Association for Computing Machinery each year in conjunction with the SC Conference series (formerly known as the Supercomputing Conference). The prize recognizes outstanding achievement in hig ...

for high-performance computing (2001), the

Lovelace Medal The Lovelace Medal was established by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT in 1998, and is presented to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the understanding or advancement of computing. It is the top award in computing in the U ...

of the

British Computer Society image:Maurice Vincent Wilkes 1980 (3).jpg, Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957. The British Computer Society (BCS), branded BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, since 2009, is a professional body and a learned ...

(2002), an honorary

Doctor of Science A Doctor of Science (; most commonly abbreviated DSc or ScD) is a science doctorate awarded in a number of countries throughout the world. Africa Algeria and Morocco In Algeria, Morocco, Libya and Tunisia, all universities accredited by the s ...

from the University of Canterbury in 2005, the IEEE Tsutomu Kanai Award (2011), the IEEE Computer Society

Charles Babbage Charles Babbage (; 26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer. Babbage is considered ...

Award, (with Carl Kesselman) the IEEE Computer Society Harry H Goode Memorial Award (2020), the

IEEE Internet Award IEEE Internet Award is a Technical Field Award established by the IEEE in June 1999. The award is sponsored by Nokia Corporation. It may be presented annually to an individual or up to three recipients, for exceptional contributions to the ad ...

(2023), and the ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award (2022). He was elected Fellow of the

in 2001,

Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellowship of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (FAAAS) is an honor accorded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to distinguished persons who are members of the Association. Fellows are elected ...

in 2003, and in 2009, a Fellow of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

, who named him the inaugural recipient of the high-performance parallel and distributed computing (HPDC) achievement award in 2012. In 2017, he was recognised with the Euro-Par Achievement Award.

Research

Foster's research focuses on the acceleration of discovery in a network using

distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

. With Carl Kesselman and Steve Tuecke, Foster coined the term

grid computing Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished fro ...

: techniques for data-intensive, multi-institution collaboration that paved the way for

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

. Methods and software developed under his leadership advanced discovery in areas as high energy physics, environmental science, and biomedicine. For example, grid computing was credited by

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...

director Rolf-Dieter Heuer as one of the elements essential for the 2012 discovery of the

Higgs boson The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the excited state, quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the field (physics), fields in particl ...

. His research has also resulted in the development of techniques, tools and

algorithms In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for per ...

for high-performance

and

parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computing, computation in which many calculations or Process (computing), processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. ...

. His Globus Toolkit project encouraged collaborative computing for engineering, business and other fields. In March 2004, Foster co-founded Univa Corporation to commercialize the technology.

Publications

*''Strand: New Concepts for Parallel Programming''.

Prentice Hall Prentice Hall was a major American publishing#Textbook_publishing, educational publisher. It published print and digital content for the 6–12 and higher-education market. It was an independent company throughout the bulk of the twentieth cen ...

, 1990. *
Designing and Building Parallel Programs
'.

Addison-Wesley Addison–Wesley is an American publisher of textbooks and computer literature. It is an imprint of Pearson plc, a global publishing and education company. In addition to publishing books, Addison–Wesley also distributes its technical titles ...

, 1994. *''The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure''.

Morgan Kaufmann Morgan Kaufmann Publishers is a Burlington, Massachusetts (San Francisco, California until 2008) based publisher specializing in computer science and engineering content. Since 1984, Morgan Kaufmann has been publishing contents on information te ...

, 1998. *''The Sourcebook of Parallel Computing''.

, 2003. *''The Grid 2, Second Edition: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure''.

Elsevier Elsevier ( ) is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as ''The Lancet'', ''Cell (journal), Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, ...

, 2004. *
Big Data and Social Science
'.

CRC Press The CRC Press, LLC is an American publishing group that specializes in producing technical books. Many of their books relate to engineering, science and mathematics. Their scope also includes books on business, forensics and information technol ...

, 2016. *
Cloud Computing for Science and Engineering
'.

MIT Press The MIT Press is the university press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The MIT Press publishes a number of academic journals and has been a pioneer in the Open Ac ...

, November 2017.

Footnotes

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Foster, Ian 1959 births Living people New Zealand computer scientists People educated at Wellington College, Wellington Alumni of the Department of Computing, Imperial College London University of Canterbury alumni University of Chicago faculty Researchers in distributed computing New Zealand emigrants to the United States