Attendee: Marc Abrams

Marc Abrams received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and BSEE from the University of Maryland at College Park. He was then a Visiting Scientist in the network group at IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland, a post-doc at Stanford’s Computer Science Department developing parallel simulation algorithms, and an Associate Professor with Tenure in Computer Science at Virginia Tech. He then co-founded Harmonia with the initial charter reflected in its name of creating harmony between people and computers through better human-computer interface design. As CTO at Harmonia he has initiated many projects. One example is the development of a new product to solve the “last mile analytic” problem for Big Data users that is currently in beta testing at www.calculationswithoutcode.com. The RapidStat tool bridges the gap between the lingua franca of analysts worldwide, namely spreadsheets, and the world of big data technologies such as Hadoop and MapReduce, no-SQL databases, and General Purpose Graphical Processors acting as supercomputers on a chip. RapidStat empowers Excel users to design and compose apps that are deployed on a compute cluster or cloud from building blocks that may be MapReduce jobs, Apache Oozie workflows, CUDA codes for GPUs, statistical algorithms in the R language, and more. This achievement is the pinnacle of a $30M research and development program mapped out by Dr. Abrams at Harmonia and funded by DOD, DOE, DOT, NIH, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and others.