Biography

Rakesh Nagi is Professor and Head of the Engineering Systems and Design Pillar at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. He joined in August 2023. He is also Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (on leave). He served as the Department Head of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at UIUC (2013-2019). He also served as the Interim Director of the Illinois Applied Research Institute (2016-2018). He is an affiliate faculty in Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Coordinated Science Laboratory, Computational Science and Engineering, and Discovery Partners Initiative at UIUC.

Previously he served as the Chair (2006-2012) and Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) (1993-2013). He received his PhD (1991) and MS (1989) degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park, while he worked at the Institute for Systems Research and INRIA, France, and BE (1987) degree in Mechanical Engineering from University of Roorkee (now Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee), India.

Rakesh is a recipient of the IISE David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award (2022), INFORMS Koopman Award from Military Application Society (2021, 2018), DARPA Graph Challenge, Champion (2020), Honorable Mention (2017, 2019), Finalist (2018), Innovation Award (2018, 2019), IIE Transactions on Design and Manufacturing, Best paper award from journal issues from July 2011 through June 2012 (2013), IIE Fellow Award (2010), University at Buffalo’s Sustained Achievement Award (2009), Buffalo Business First’s 40 under 40 award (2004), SME’s Milton C. Shaw Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award (1999), IIE’s Outstanding Young Industrial Engineer Award in Academia (1999), and National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award (1996).

His papers have been published in journals including IIE Transactions, International Journal of Production Research, Journal of Manufacturing Systems, International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems, Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, Computers in Industry, Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems, Management Science, Operations Research, Naval Research Logistics, European Journal of Operational Research, Annals of Operations Research, Computers and Operations Research, Computers and Industrial Engineering, and ASME and IEEE Transactions. Rakesh’s major research thrusts are in applied/military operations research and production/manufacturing systems. His research interests are in Big Graphs, High-level Information Fusion, Location theoretic approaches to Facilities Design, Production Management and Scheduling, Agile Manufacturing and Information-Based Manufacturing.

Education

• Doctor of Philosophy in Mechanical Engineering*
  University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland
  1991
• Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering*
  University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland
  1989
• Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering
  University of Roorkee, Roorkee, India (now IIT-Roorkee)
  1987

*Graduate work performed at the Institute for Systems Research (National Science Foundation sponsored interdisciplinary Engineering Research Center), with significant Industrial and Systems Engineering emphasis.

Research Interests

Facilities Design, Production Management, Agile Manufacturing, Big Graphs, Military and Applied Operations Research, High-level Information Fusion, GPU-accelerated Computing.

Selected Publications in Refereed Scientific Journals

1. Sharmili, N., Nagi, R. and Wang, P. “A Review of Research in the Li-ion Battery Production and Reverse Supply Chains,” accepted to Journal of Energy Storage, May 2023 (Sept. 2023, Vol. 68).
2. Anzoom, R., Nagi, R. and Vogiatzis, C. “Uncovering illicit supply networks and their interfaces to licit counterparts through graph theoretic algorithms,” accepted to IISE Transactions on Operations Engineering and Analytics, December 2022.
3. Vadrevu, S. and Nagi, R. “A GPU accelerated algorithm for solving the Multi-dimensional Assignment Problem for a Multi-Target Tracking application,” IEEE Transactions on Automation, Science and Engineering, June 2023, Vol, 20(3), pp. 1706 – 1720.
4. Sengupta, R., Nagi, R. and Sreenivas, R.S. “Equitable Allocation of Operations and Makespan Minimization for Autonomous Agents,” IEEE Transactions on Automation, Science and Engineering, Jan. 2023, Vol. 20(1), pp. 703-717.
5. Yekkehkhany, A. and Nagi, R. “Risk-Averse Equilibrium for Autonomous Vehicles in Stochastic Congestion Games,” IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2022, Vol 23(10), pp. 18719-18735.
6. Anzoom, R., Nagi, R. and Vogiatzis, C. “A Review of Research in Illicit Supply-Chain Networks and New Directions to Thwart them,” IISE Transactions on Operations Engineering, Feb. 2022, Vol 54(2), pp. 134-158.
7. Murray, T., Garg, J. and Nagi, R. “Prize-Collecting Multi-Agent Orienteering: Price of Anarchy Bounds and Solution Methods,” IEEE Transactions on Automation, Science and Engineering, Jan. 2022, Vol. 19(1), pp. 531-544.
8. Yekkehkhany, A., Murray, T. and Nagi, R. “Stochastic Superiority Equilibrium in Game Theory,” Decision Analysis, June 2021, Vol. 18(2), pp. 153-168.
9. Yekkehkhany, A., Arian, E., Nagi, R., and Shomorony, I. “A Cost-Based Analysis for Risk-Averse Explore-Then-Commit Finite-Time Bandits,” IISE Transactions on Operations Engineering, Oct. 2021, Vol. 53(10), pp. 1094-1108.
10. Ghayoori, A. and Nagi, R. “Seed Investment Bounds for Viral Marketing under Generalized Diffusion and Selection Guidance,” IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, June 2021, Vol. 8(3), pp. 546-556.
11. Murray, T., Garg, J. and Nagi, R. “Limited Trust Equilibria,” European Journal of Operational Research, Feb. 2021, Vol. 289(1), pp. 364-380.
12. Worden, M., Murray, C.C., Karwan, M.H., Ortiz-Peña, H.J. and Nagi, R. “Sensor Tasking for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Disaster Management Missions with Limited Communications Bandwidth,” Computer & Industrial Engineering, Nov. 2020, Vol. 149, pp. 106754-16.
13. Natu, S., Date, K. and Nagi, R. “GPU-accelerated Lagrangian Heuristic for Multidimensional Assignment Problems with Decomposable Costs,” Parallel Computing, Sept. 2020, Vol. 97, pp. 102666.
14. Yekkehkhany, A. and Nagi, R. “Blind GB-PANDAS: A Blind Throughput-Optimal Load Balancing Algorithm for Affinity Scheduling,” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, June 2020, Vol. 28(3), pp. 1199-1212.
15. Thakoor, O., Garg, J. and Nagi, R. “Multi-Agent UAV Routing: A Game Theory Analysis with Tight Price of Anarchy Bounds,” IEEE Transactions on Automation, Science and Engineering, January 2020, Vol. 17(1), pp. 100-116. [INFORMS MAS Koopman Prize in 2021.]

Selected Publications in Conference Proceedings

1. Hiyadetoglu, M., Mailthody, V.S., Yesil, S., Almasri, M., Busato, F., Ren, B., Xiong, J., Nagi, R., and Hwu, W-M. “Optimizing Tiled Sparse Matrix Multiplication with Performance Modeling on GPUs,” (to be resubmitted).
2. Sengupta, R., Nagi, and Sreenivas, R.S. “Approximating the Makespan Minimization problem with Connectivity Constraints,” (to be resubmitted).
3. Sengupta, R., Nagi, R., Norris, W.R., Sreenivas, R.S., Nottage, D., and Soylemezoglu, A. “Approximating the Makespan Minimization problem with Connectivity Constraints,” (to be resubmitted).
4. Gupta, V., Garg, J., and Nagi, R. “Exploratory Analysis of Algorithms for Fair and Efficient
   Allocation of Indivisible Chores,” 26^th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2023), Sept 30 – Oct 5, 2023, Kraków, Poland (to be resubmitted).
5. Almasri, M., Chang, Y.-H, El Hajj, I., Nagi, R., Xiong, J., and Hwu, W-M. ” Parallelizing Maximal Clique Enumeration on GPUs,” 32nd International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT 2023), October 21–25, 2023, Vienna, Austria (accepted).
6. Kawtikwar, S., Almasri, M., Hwu, W-M., Nagi, R., and Xiong, J. “BEEP: Balanced Efficient subgraph Enumeration in Parallel,” 52^nd International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP 2023), August 7-10, 2023, Salt Lake City, Utah.
7. Kawtikwar, S. and Nagi, R. “Multi-Target Tracking with GPU-Accelerated Data Association Engine,” 26th International Conference on Information Fusion, Charleston, SC, June 27-30, 2023.
8. Leon, V., Etesami, S.R., and Nagi, R. “Diffusion of Innovation under Limited-Trust Equilibrium,” 61st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Dec. 6-9, 2022, Cancún, Mexico.
9. Shin, J., Arroyo, D., Tantawi, A., Wang, C., Youssef, A., and Nagi, R. “Cloud-native Workflow Scheduling using a Hybrid Priority Rule and Dynamic Task Parallelism,” ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC’22), November 2022, San Francisco, CA.
10. Nagi, R. “Research in Production Systems and Management: “How to” and Lessons,” The IFAC MIM ‘2022 Conference, Nantes, France, 22-25 June 2022.
11. Almasri, M., El Hajj, I., Nagi, R., Xiong, J., and Hwu, W-M. “Parallel K-Clique Counting on GPUs,” 36th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS) (ICS’22), June 27 – June 30, 2022, virtual.
12. Dodeja, V., Almasri, M., Nagi, R., Xiong, J., and Hwu, W-M. “PARSEC: PARallel Subgraph Enumeration in CUDA,” IPDPS 2022, 36th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium, May 30 – June 3, 2022, Lyon, France.
13. Lobato, A.M., Norris, W.R., Nagi, R., Nottage, D., and Soylemezoglu, A. “Machine Learning for Soil Moisture Prediction Using Hyperspectral and Multispectral Data,” 24th International Conference on Information Fusion, South Africa, hybrid due to COVID-19, November 2021.
14. AlMasri, M., Vasudeva, N., Nagi, R., Xiong, J., and Hwu, W-M. “HyKernel: A Hybrid Selection of One/Two-Phase Kernels for Triangle Counting on GPUs,” High Performance Extreme Computing Conference (HPEC), 2021 IEEE, Waltham, MA, 21-23 September 2021. [DARPA Graph Challenge Student Innovation Award.]
15. Anzoom, R., Nagi, R., and Vogiatzis, C. “A Framework To Assess Risk of Illicit Trades Using Bayesian Belief Networks,” APMS 2021 International Conference Advances in Production Management Systems, Nante, France, 5-9 September 2021.
16. Sengupta, R., and Nagi, R. “Decentralized Makespan Minimization for Uniformly Related Agents,” 2021 IEEE 17th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), Lyon, France, 23-27 August 2021.
17. Vadrevu, S., Xiong, J., Hwu, W-M., and Nagi, R. “xER: An Explainable Model for Entity Resolution using an Efficient Solution for the Clique Partitioning Problem,” 2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), Mexico City, MX, 11-16 June 2021.
18. Lobato, A.M., Nagi, R., Norris, W.R., Juston, M., Nottage, D., and Soylemezoglu, A. “Comparison of Semantic Segmentation Deep Learning Models for Land Use Mapping: Site Characterization for Construction Site Preparation,” 2021 Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference, Virtual, May 22-25, 2021.
19. Hiyadetoglu, M., Mailthody, V.S., Pearson, C., Ebrahimi, E., Xiong, J., Nagi, R., and Hwu, W-M. “Efficient Inference on GPUs for the Sparse Deep Neural Network Graph Challenge 2020,” High Performance Extreme Computing Conference (HPEC), 2020 IEEE, Waltham, MA, 24-26 September 2020. [DARPA Graph Challenge Champion!]
20. Lewandowski, J., Nagi, R., Norris, W.R., Sreenivas, R.S., Nottage, D., and Soylemezoglu, A. “An Ontology for Semantic Classification of Construction Areas and Tasks,” 2020 Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference, New Orleans LA, Oct-Nov 2020.
21. Sengupta, R., Nagi, R., Norris, W.R., Sreenivas, R.S., Nottage, D., and Soylemezoglu, A. “A Balancing Algorithm for Robust Decentralized Parallel Machine Scheduling to Minimize Makespan,” 2020 Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference, New Orleans LA, Oct-Nov 2020.
22. Vadrevu, S. and Nagi, R., “A Dual-Ascent Algorithm for the Multi-dimensional Assignment Problem: Application to Multi-Target Tracking,” 23rd International Conference on Information Fusion, South Africa, online due to COVID-19, 6-9 July 2020.
23. Kim, D., Chen, D., and Nagi, R. “Thanos: High-Performance CPU-GPU Based Balanced Graph Partitioning Using Cross-Decomposition,” 25th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference ASP DAC 2020, Beijing, China, 13-16 January 2020.

Honours and Awards

1. IISE David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award (2022). Recognizes outstanding research in the ISE profession. It is given for a career of accomplishments that broadly benefited practitioners, organizations, or other researchers rather than for a single activity or application.
2. INFORMS Koopman Award from Military Application Society (2021).
3. DARPA Graph Challenge (Sparse Deep Neural Network), Champion (2020).
4. INFORMS Koopman Award from Military Application Society (2018).
5. DARPA Graph Challenge (Triangle and K-Truss counting), Honorable Mention (2017), Finalist and Innovation Award (2018), Honorable mention and Innovation Award (2019).
6. IIE Transactions on Design and Manufacturing, Best paper award from journal issues from July 2011 through June 2012 (2013).
7. Fellow of IIE, the Institute of Industrial Engineers (2010). In recognition of outstanding leadership in the profession, and significant and recognized contributions to Industrial Engineering.
8. Sustained Achievement Award (2009). In Recognition of Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Activity, University at Buffalo.
9. Promising Inventor Award, SUNY/RF (2004). Awarded to 97 faculty across SUNY for submitting invention disclosures.
10. Business First of Buffalo’s 40 under 40 award (2004).
11. International Who’s Who of Professionals (2004).
12. Who’s Who in America (2002).
13. IIE’s Outstanding Young Industrial Engineer Award in Academia (1999).
14. SME’s Milton C. Shaw Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award (1999).
15. Invited participant (one of 78 young engineers between ages of 30-45 nationwide) to National Academy of Engineering’s Fifth Annual Symposium on Frontiers of Engineering (1999).
16. National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award (1996).
17. University at Buffalo, Riefler Award (1995, 1997).
18. University of Maryland, Systems Research Center’s Outstanding Systems Engineering Graduate Student Award (1991).
19. University of Maryland, Systems Research Center Graduate Fellowship (1989, 1990, 1991).
20. University of Maryland, Graduate School Fellowship (1989).
21. University of Roorkee Merit Prize for overall first rank in Mechanical Engineering (1987).
22. University of Roorkee Scholarship for all four years of undergraduate study (1983-87).
23. Silver medal for obtaining highest marks in Machine Design group in B.E. (1987).
24. Silver medal for obtaining highest marks in Applied Thermo-Science group in B.E. (1987).

Research Projects

• Hybrid AI/ML-Optimization Approaches to Cloud Native Workflow Scheduling,” IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute
• Mitigating the Harm of Fentanyl through Holistic Demand/Supply-Chain Interventions and Equitable Resource Allocations,” National Science Foundation (USA)
• GPU-Accelerated Algorithms for Multi-Sensor Data Association for Multi-Target Tracking.