Viktor Prasanna - Biography#

Viktor Prasanna (https://sites.usc.edu/prasanna) is Charles Lee Powell Chair in Engineering and is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor of Computer Science at University of Southern California and serves as the director of the Center for Energy Informatics. He received his BE (BS) in Electronics from Bangalore University, ME from Indian Institute of Science, and PhD in Computer Science from Pennsylvania State University.

Prasanna is an internationally recognized leader in parallel and distributed computing, particularly reconfigurable computing - as a producer of visionary research that developed high performance application specific architectures and algorithms using Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). As one of the most prolific and highly impactful researchers in the FPGA community, over the past 25 years, Prasanna has contributed to the development of highly optimized application specific designs.

His h-index is 73 and i-10 index is 426 with total citations of 23,454. Prasanna’s work resulted in highly optimized IP cores for key problems in many areas including networking, security, HPC, machine learning and demonstrated improved throughput, or reduced latency or superior energy efficiency. He published over 600 papers in international conferences and highly reputed journals. He received 22 best paper awards. He has advised over 70 doctoral students. Over the past 25 years his research grants and contract awards exceed US$ 50M. During 2016-21, he has been awarded research grants exceeding $12.9M.

Prasanna has been a visionary leader in significant large-scale interdisciplinary centers and collaborative research bridging energy technologies, computer science, and engineering to develop innovative solutions to complex interdisciplinary problems. Some recent efforts include: Executive Director, Infosys-USC Center for Advanced Software Technologies; Director, Center for Energy Informatics; Associate Director, Center for Interactive Smart Oil Field Technologies, which studied Big Data applications in the oil industry.

He was editor in chief of IEEE Trans on Computers and is currently the editor in chief of Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. He was the founding chair of IEEE Technical Committee on Parallel Processing.