Shahid Hussain Bokhari

Dr. Shahid H. Bokhari (born January 17, 1953 in Lahore, Pakistan ) is an internationally acclaimed and highly cited [ [http://hcr3.isiknowledge.com/author.cgi?&link1=Browse&link2=Results&id=1644 Shahid Bokhari at ISI Highly Cited Researchers] ] [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=s+h+bokhari Google Scholar Search for Bokhari's publications (searched on October 13 2006)] ] Pakistani researcher in the field of parallel and distributed computing. He is a fellow of both IEEE [ [http://www.ieee.org/web/membership/fellows/Regional/region_ten.html List of Region ten IEEE fellows] ] [http://www.ieee.org/web/membership/fellows/Alphabetical/bfellows.html IEEE Fellows: B] ] and ACM [http://fellows.acm.org/fellow_citation.cfm?id=1596477&srt=all ACM Fellow citation for Bokhari] ] . Dr. Bokhari's ACM Fellow citation states that he received the award for his "research contributions to automatic load balancing and partitioning of distributed processes", while his IEEE Fellow award recognizes his "contributions to the mapping problem in parallel and distributed computing".

At the time of his retirement in 2005, Professor Bokhari was the only IEEE/ACM Fellow and the only Pakistani ISI Highly Cited Researcher resident in Pakistan. Dr. Bokhari's resignation led to a letter-writing campaign by several of his former students who were dismayed at what they claimed to be mismanagement at the state-run Pakistani universities. [ [http://www.pakistanlink.com/Opinion/2005/Dec05/23/05.HTM A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste] , A. Mian, Pakistan Link, Dec. 2005. [http://www.nation.com.pk/daily/nov-2005/11/letters3.php A victim of politics?] The Nation, Nov. 11, 2005. [http://sst.umt.edu.pk/others/article.htm A legend lost to incompetence] , S. M. Sarwar, Dawn, Nov. 21, 2005. [http://www.dawn.com/2006/02/14/letted.htm Working conditions at UET] , K. Aftab, Dawn, Feb. 14, 2006. [http://www.dawn.com/2006/02/21/letted.htm HEC clarifies on UET] , Dawn, Feb. 21, 2006. [http://www.chowk.com/show_article.cgi?aid=00005885&channel=university%20ave And Dr. Shahid Hussain Bokhari Quits...] , O. Cheema, Nov. 3, 2005.]

Biography

A biography of Bokhari can be found at the Department of Biomedical Informatics, Ohio State University, where Dr. Bokhari has been a visiting researcher. [ [http://www.bmi.osu.edu/personnel/detail.cfm?id=274 Biosketch, Shahid Bokhari] , Department of Biomedical Informatics, Ohio State University.]

Shahid Bokhari received his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore in 1974.

He then received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1976 and 1978, respectively.

He was with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan from 1980 to 2005 where he held the position of a Professor. He also served as Director of the Computer Systems Laboratory, Communications Laboratory and the Postgraduate Program at the Department of Electrical Engineering as well as the Directorate of Research Extension & Advisory Services of the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore. He purportedly tendered his resignation from the Department of Electrical Engineering University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore over a dispute with the administration, notably the Vice-Chancellor Lt. Gen. (retd.) M. Akram and the Chairman of Department of Electrical Engineering Prof. M. Saleem Mian, and dissatisfaction with the policies of the country's Higher Education Commission (HEC). Dr. Shahid Bokhari maintains he did not resign under protest for not being appointed Chairman of Department, although his critics claim otherwise. Dr. Bokhari has been associated with the Institute for Computer Applications in Science & Engineering (ICASE) at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, where he spent a total of about seven years as a visiting scientist or consultant over the period 1978-1998. [ [http://web.archive.org/web/20060501114154/http://www.icase.edu/RQ/archive/v7n3/bokhari.html Archived copy of Bokhari's profile at ICASE] .] Other institutions that he has been associated with as a researcher include the University of Colorado (USA), Stuttgart University (Germany), University of Vienna (Austria), and the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan.

Research Interests

Dr. Bokhari's research interests include parallel and distributed computing, applied to computational biology and bioinformatics. He is, particularly, interested in parallel algorithms for DNA alignment and assembly.

One of Dr. Bokhari's most-cited research publication: "On the Mapping Problem" (1981) concerns the assignment of subtasks for distributed computation to processors in such a way that the subtasks that communicate with each other are, to the extent possible, assigned to the processors that are adjacent to each other within the communication network. His paper relates this problem to more abstract graph-theoretical problems, in particular, graph isomorphism. He also relates the problem to the representation of sparse linear systems as band matrices with low bandwidth, and to the quadratic assignment problem. This is the work for which Dr. Bokhari was cited in his IEEE Fellow award.

Several other highly-cited papers of Dr. Bokhari concern the Partitioning and Load Balancing Problems in Distributed Computing, the topic mentioned in his ACM Fellow award citation. As with the Mapping Problem, this concerns assignment of tasks to processors, but in a more general setting in which a processor may handle multiple tasks; the problem is to perform this assignment in such a way that heavily-communicating pairs of tasks are assigned to the same processor, while keeping the amount of work assigned to processors relatively even.

Dr. Bokhari's research with Marsha Berger (Berger and Bokhari 1987) concerns versions of the partitioning problem in which different tasks may have greatly differing workloads; he gives as an application the distributed solution of nonlinear partial differential equations. The technique introduced in this paper, recursive coordinate bisection, repeatedly divides the geometric problem domain along coordinate axes into two subdomains of equal workload until the number of subdomains formed equals the number of processors. However, as Simon writes, although this method is conceptually very simple it tends to produce long and thin or even disconnected subdomains. [cite journal | author = Simon, Horst D. | title = Partitioning of unstructured problems for parallel processing | journal = Computing Systems in Engineering | volume = 2 | issue 2-3 | pages = 135–148 | year = 1991 | doi = 10.1016/0956-0521(91)90014-V] A later refinement of this technique, parametric binary dissection (Bokhari, Crockett, and Nicol 1993) combines shape information with load balancing in its partitioning decisions in an attempt to mitigate this problem. Another of Bokhari's papers (Bokhari 1988), his third most-highly cited, provides an algorithm that optimally solves the partitioning problem for several broad classes of distributed algorithm.

elected Works

Books

*cite book
author = Bokhari, Shahid H.
title = Assignment Problems in Parallel and Distributed Computing
publisher = Kluwer Academic Publishers
location = Boston
year = 1987
id = ISBN 0-89838-240-8 95 citations.

Papers

*cite journal
author = Bokhari, Shahid H.; Stone, Harold
title = Control of distributed processes
journal = IEEE Computer
volume = 11
issue = 7
pages = 97–106
year = 1978 45 citations.

*cite journal
author = Bokhari, Shahid H.
title = Dual processor scheduling with dynamic reassignment
journal = IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
volume = SE-5
issue = 4
pages = 341–349
year = 1979
doi = 10.1109/TSE.1979.234201 41 citations.

*cite journal
author = Bokhari, Shahid H.
title = On the mapping problem
journal = IEEE Transactions on Computers
volume = C-30
issue = 3
pages = 207–214
year = 1981
doi = 10.1109/TC.1981.1675756 245 citations.

*cite journal
author = Bokhari, Shahid H.
title = A shortest tree algorithm for optimal assignments across space and time in a distributed processor system
journal = IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
volume = SE-7
issue = 11
pages = 583–589
year = 1981
doi = 10.1109/TSE.1981.226469 73 citations.

*cite journal
author = Bokhari, Shahid H.
title = Finding maximum on an array processor with a global bus
journal = IEEE Transactions on Computers
volume = C-33
issue = 2
pages = 133–139
year = 1984
doi = 10.1109/TC.1984.1676405 61 citations.

*cite journal
author = Berger, Marsha; Bokhari, Shahid H.
title = A partitioning strategy for non-uniform problems across multiprocessors
journal = IEEE Transactions on Computers
volume = C-36
issue = 5
pages = 570–580
year = 1987 298 citations.

*cite journal
author = Bokhari, Shahid H.
title = Partitioning problems in parallel, pipelined and distributed computing
journal = IEEE Transactions on Computers
volume = C-37
issue = 1
pages = 48–57
year = 1988
doi = 10.1109/12.75137 140 citations.

*cite paper
author = Bokhari, Shahid H.
title = Communication overheads on the Intel iPSC-860 hypercube
publisher = ICASE Interim Report 10
date = 1990 49 citations.

*cite conference
author = Berryman, H.; Bokhari, Shahid H.
title = Complete exchange on a circuit-switched mesh
booktitle = Proceedings of the Scalable High Performance Computing Conference
pages = 300–306
date = 1992 49 citations.

A longer list of his publications is available from the DBLP Bibliography Server. [ [http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/b/Bokhari:Shahid_H=.html DBLP: Shahid Bokhari] .] Citation counts are derived from a Google Scholar search.

References