Ramakrishnan (Ramki) Kannan, a Distinguished Scientist, leads the Discrete Algorithms group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His research expertise lies in distributed machine learning and graph algorithms on HPC platforms, particularly their application to scientific data to accelerate scientific discovery by reducing computation time from weeks to seconds. He led the DSNAPSHOT project for COVID-19, which was a finalist for the Association of Computing Machinery’s Gordon Bell Award in 2020 and 2022. Under his leadership, Summit ranked 3rd on the Graph500 benchmark using the fewest resources—an unprecedented achievement for an OLCF system. He also led a team that demonstrated 1 ExaFLOPS on a KnowledgeGraph AI application for the first time on Frontier, earning the UT-Battelle Research Accomplishment Award in 2023.

Dr. Kannan has secured over $8M in research funding from various agencies to solve algorithmic problems on HPC platforms and has led projects worth over $1 million for the Department of Defense. Currently, he serves as the Deputy Director for the DOE Mathematical Multifaceted Integrated Capability Center (MMICC) Sparsitute. He co-authored “Knowledge-guided Machine Learning” with Prof. Anuj Karpatne of Virginia Tech and Prof. Vipin Kumar of the University of Minnesota, published in 2022. With over 24 patents issued by the USPTO, he was also an IBM Master Inventor. Dr. Kannan earned his Ph.D. under Professor Haesun Park at Georgia Institute of Technology and his M.Sc (Engg) under Professor Y. Narahari at the Indian Institute of Science.

Research Interests

• Scalable Data mining, Machine learning and Graph Algorithms on HPC systems and big data architectures
• Linear and Non-linear dimensionality reduction algorithms such as Matrix & tensor factorization, autoencoders, factor models and Low Rank Approximation
• Principal investigator for Parallel Low Rank Approximation with Non-negative Constraints (PLANC)

ERP Information : Visit my IISc webpage for External registration information. Not well maintained.

One Bethel Valley Rd, P.O. Box 2008, MS-6085, Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6086