Bio

Short Bio (suitable for talks etc.)

Karthik Pattabiraman is a Professor and associate head of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He received his PhD in 2009 in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), an MS in Computer Science also from UIUC in 2004, and B. Tech. from the University of Madras, India, in 2001. Before joining UBC in 2010, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research (MSR), Redmond. Karthik’s research interests are in dependable computer systems, systems security, cyber-physical systems and software engineering. Karthik has won awards such as the Inaugural IEEE Rising Star in Dependability Award, UIUC CS department’s early career alumni achievement award, UBC-wide Killam mentoring excellence award, UBC-wide Killam Faculty Research Prize and Killam Faculty Research Fellowship, NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement (DAS) in Canada, and the William Carter PhD Dissertation Award. Karthik is the vice-chair of the IFIP Working Group (WG) 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault-tolerance, and a member of the steering committee of the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN). He is a distinguished member of the ACM, a distinguished contributor of the IEEE Computer Society, and a professional engineer (P.Eng.) in Canada.

Long Bio

Karthik Pattabiraman is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada. He received his PhD in 2009 in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), an MS in Computer Science also from UIUC in 2004, and B. Tech. from the University of Madras, India, in 2001. Before joining UBC, he was a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research for a year in 2009. His research interests are in dependable computer systems, systems security, cyber-physical systems and software engineering.

Karthik won the Inaugural IEEE Rising Star in Dependability Award in 2020, UIUC CS department’s early career distinguished alumni award in 2018, UBC-wide Killam mentoring excellence award in 2020, UBC-wide Killam Faculty Research Prize in 2018, UBC-wide Killam Faculty Research Fellowship in 2016, NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement (DAS) in 2015, and the William Carter Dissertation Award in 2008. Together with his students, he has won twelve best paper (or runner up) awards at venues such as DSN, ICSE, ISSRE, ICST, QRS, etc. His students have won awards such as the SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation award, the William Carter dissertation award in dependability, and the SIGHPC distinguished dissertation award (honorable mention).

Karthik initiated and led the Flikker project at Microsoft Research, which was one of the first papers in the field of what is now known as “approximate computing” or “good enough computing” (a term that he coined in a talk). He is listed in the DSN conference hall of fame (in the top 10%). He is a member of the IFIP Working Group (WG) 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault-tolerance (vice-chair from 2019), and the steering committees of the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), and the IEEE Pacific Rim International Conference on Dependable Computing (PRDC) and the Trustworthy Machine Learning (TrustML) cluster at UBC. He is a Professional Engineer (P.Eng.) in BC, a distinguished contrbutor of the IEEE Computer Society, and a distinguished member of the ACM. He serves as the associate head for graduate affairs in the ECE department at UBC.