Shahid H. Bokhari (born 17 January 1952 in

Lahore Lahore ( ; ; ) is the capital and largest city of the Administrative units of Pakistan, Pakistani province of Punjab, Pakistan, Punjab. It is the List of cities in Pakistan by population, second-largest city in Pakistan, after Karachi, and ...

Pakistan Pakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by population, fifth-most populous country, with a population of over 241.5 million, having the Islam by country# ...

) is a highly citedGoogle Scholar Search for Bokhari's publications (searched on 13 October 2006)
/ref> Pakistani researcher in the field of

parallel Parallel may refer to: Mathematics * Parallel (geometry), two lines in the Euclidean plane which never intersect * Parallel (operator), mathematical operation named after the composition of electrical resistance in parallel circuits Science a ...

and

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 ...

. He is a

fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

of both

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IEEE Fellows: B
/ref> and

ACM ACM or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * IATA airport code for Arica Airport in Amazonas Department, Colombia Computing ...

.ACM Fellow citation for Bokhari
/ref> Bokhari's

ACM Fellow ACM Fellowship is an award and fellowship that recognises outstanding members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The title of ACM Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals ...

citation states that he received the award for his "research contributions to automatic load balancing and partitioning of distributed processes", while his IEEE Fellow award recognises his "contributions to the mapping problem in parallel and distributed computing". At the time of his retirement in 2005, Bokhari was the only IEEE/ACM Fellow and the only Pakistani

ISI Highly Cited Researcher The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was an academic publishing service, founded by Eugene Garfield in Philadelphia in 1956. ISI offered scientometric and bibliographic database services. Its specialty was citation indexing and analysis ...

resident in Pakistan. Bokhari's resignation led to a letter-writing campaign by several of his former students who were dismayed at what they claimed to be mismanagement at the state-run Pakistani universities.

Early life and education

Bokhari was born on 17 January, 1952 in Lahore, Pakistan. He is the son of Mr. Riyaz Hussain Bokhari, who was a federal secretary, Auditor General of Pakistan, chairman of the National Fertilizer Corporation (NFC) and also worked at the Packages Group, Pakistan. His daughter, Saniyah S. Bokhari, has also published in the field of high-performance computing Bokhari received his B.Sc. in

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

from the

University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore A university () is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Uni ...

in 1974. He then received his MS and PhD in

electrical and computer engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

from the

University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) is a public land-grant research university in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts system and was founded in 1863 as the ...

in 1976 and 1978, respectively. His Ph.D. supervisor at the

was Professor Harold S. Stone. Bokhari was a visiting researcher at the Department of Biomedical Informatics,

Ohio State University The Ohio State University (Ohio State or OSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio, United States. A member of the University System of Ohio, it was founded in 1870. It is one ...

Career

He was with the Department of Electrical Engineering,

, Pakistan, from 1980 to 2005 where he held the position of a professor. He also served as director of the Computer Systems Laboratory, Communications Laboratory and the postgraduate program at the Department of Electrical Engineering as well as the directorate of Research Extension & Advisory Services of the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore. He (purportedly) tendered his resignation from the Department of Electrical Engineering,

, over a dispute with the administration, notably, the then vice-chancellor, Lieutenant General (retired) M. Akram, and the chairman, Department of Electrical Engineering and his dissatisfaction with the policies of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan. Bokhari maintains that he did not resign under protest for not being appointed chairman of department, although his critics claim otherwise. Bokhari has been associated with the Institute for Computer Applications in Science & Engineering (ICASE) at

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, Virginia, where he spent a total of about seven years as a visiting scientist or consultant over the period 1978–1998. Other institutions that he has been associated with as a researcher include the University of

Colorado Colorado is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States. It is one of the Mountain states, sharing the Four Corners region with Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. It is also bordered by Wyoming to the north, Nebraska to the northeast, Kansas ...

(USA),

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University (Germany), University of

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(Austria), and the Electrotechnical Laboratory in

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, Japan.

Research Interests

Bokhari's research interests include parallel and distributed computing, applied to

computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of techniques in computer science, data analysis, mathematical modeling and Computer simulation, computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer sci ...

and

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and Bioinformatics software, software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, ...

. He is, particularly, interested in parallel algorithms for

DNA Deoxyribonucleic acid (; DNA) is a polymer composed of two polynucleotide chains that coil around each other to form a double helix. The polymer carries genetic instructions for the development, functioning, growth and reproduction of al ...

alignment and assembly. One of Bokhari's most-cited research publication: "On the Mapping Problem" (1981) concerns the assignment of subtasks for distributed computation to processors in such a way that the subtasks that communicate with each other are, to the extent possible, assigned to the processors that are adjacent to each other within the communication network. His paper relates this problem to more abstract graph-theoretical problems, in particular,

graph isomorphism In graph theory, an isomorphism of graphs ''G'' and ''H'' is a bijection between the vertex sets of ''G'' and ''H'' : f \colon V(G) \to V(H) such that any two vertices ''u'' and ''v'' of ''G'' are adjacent in ''G'' if and only if f(u) and f(v) a ...

. He also relates the problem to the representation of sparse linear systems as band matrices with low bandwidth, and to the

quadratic assignment problem The quadratic assignment problem (QAP) is one of the fundamental combinatorial optimization problems in the branch of optimization or operations research in mathematics, from the category of the facilities location problems first introduced by Koo ...

. This is the work for which Bokhari was cited in his IEEE Fellow award. Several other highly cited papers of Bokhari concern the partitioning and load balancing problems in distributed computing, the topic mentioned in his ACM Fellow award citation. As with the Mapping Problem, this concerns assignment of tasks to processors, but in a more general setting in which a processor may handle multiple tasks; the problem is to perform this assignment in such a way that heavily communicating pairs of tasks are assigned to the same processor, while keeping the amount of work assigned to processors relatively even. Bokhari's research with Marsha Berger (Berger and Bokhari 1987) concerns versions of the partitioning problem in which different tasks may have greatly differing workloads; he gives as an application the distributed solution of

nonlinear In mathematics and science, a nonlinear system (or a non-linear system) is a system in which the change of the output is not proportional to the change of the input. Nonlinear problems are of interest to engineers, biologists, physicists, mathe ...

partial differential equations In mathematics, a partial differential equation (PDE) is an equation which involves a multivariable function and one or more of its partial derivatives. The function is often thought of as an "unknown" that solves the equation, similar to how ...

. The technique introduced in this paper, recursive co-ordinate bisection, repeatedly divides the geometric problem domain along co-ordinate axes into two subdomains of equal workload until the number of subdomains formed equals the number of processors. However, as

Simon Simon may refer to: People * Simon (given name), including a list of people and fictional characters with the given name Simon * Simon (surname), including a list of people with the surname Simon * Eugène Simon, French naturalist and the genus ...

writes, although this method is conceptually very simple it tends to produce long and thin or even disconnected subdomains. A later refinement of this technique, parametric binary dissection (Bokhari, Crockett, and Nicol 1993) combines shape information with load balancing in its partitioning decisions in an attempt to mitigate this problem. Another of Bokhari's papers (Bokhari 1988), his third most-highly cited, provides an algorithm that optimally solves the partitioning problem for several broad classes of

distributed algorithm A distributed algorithm is an algorithm designed to run on computer hardware constructed from interconnected processors. Distributed algorithms are used in different application areas of distributed computing, such as telecommunications, scientifi ...

Selected works

Books

* 95 citations.

Papers

* 45 citations. * 41 citations. * 245 citations. * 73 citations. * 61 citations. * 298 citations. * 140 citations. * 49 citations. * 49 citations. A longer list of his publications is available from the DBLP Bibliography Server.DBLP: Shahid Bokhari
Citation counts are derived from a Google Scholar search.

References

External links

Shahid Hussain Bokhari
at Facebook {{DEFAULTSORT:Bokhari, Shahid 1952 births Living people Pakistani scholars Pakistani scientists 2000 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the IEEE Pakistani electrical engineers Pakistani computer scientists University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Engineering alumni University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore alumni Academic staff of the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore