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Boon Thau Loo

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Boon Thau Loo
Born
Malaysia
Occupations
  • Professor
  • college administrator
  • technology entrepreneur
Known forDeclarative networking
MCIT Online
Co-founding companies Netsil and Termaxia
Academic background
EducationPhD
Alma materStanford University
University of California, Berkeley
ThesisThe Design and Implementation of Declarative Networks (2006)
Doctoral advisor
Academic work
DisciplineComputer Science
InstitutionsUniversity of Pennsylvania
Websitehttps://boonloo.cis.upenn.edu/

Boon Thau Loo is a Singaporean-American computer scientist, college administrator, and technology entrepreneur. He is currently the RCA professor in the Computer and Information Science department at the University of Pennsylvania where he leads a research lab working on distributed systems, and serves as the Associate Dean for Graduate Programs at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Early life

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Boon Thau Loo was born in Malaysia and grew up in Singapore.[2] He studied at The Chinese High School and Raffles Junior College. In 1996, he moved to the United States in order to attend the University of California, Berkeley,[3] where he received an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Following his studies there, he pursued his master's degree in computer science[4] at Stanford University.[2] He then returned to Berkeley for his PhD,[4] which he graduated in 2006 with the David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize dissertation award and the 2007 ACM SIGMOD Dissertation Award for his thesis The Design and Implementation of Declarative Networks.[1] Loo then began working as a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research.[4][2]

Academic career

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Loo is the RCA professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Pennsylvania[4] in the departments of Computer and Information Science and Electrical and Systems Engineering. He is also the director of the Distributed Systems Laboratory and the NetDB@Penn research group.[5] In 2018, he became the associate dean of master's and professional programs,[6] where he oversees the Master's and professional programs in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.[7] He has published over 150 papers[8] and two books - Declarative Networking (Synthesis Lectures on Data Management) in 2012[9] and Datalog and Recursive Query Processing (Foundations and Trends(r) in Databases) in 2013.[10] In 2019, Loo received the University of Pennsylvania Emerging Inventor of the Year award, given annually to one Penn faculty member for success in technology transfer.[11] In July 2020, Loo was appointed Associate Dean for Graduate Programs, where he oversees the doctoral, master's and professional programs at Penn Engineering.[12]

Business career

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While on sabbatical leave from Penn in 2014, Loo cofounded and led Gencore Systems,[3] a Penn startup company on cloud performance monitoring.[2] Gencore Systems was one of the first faculty-led startups from Penn's Computer Science department.[3] Leading a group of his former students that spun off the company with him, Loo formed a partnership with the OpenLab of Juniper Networks and integrated his group's research on high-performance declarative network analytics into Juniper's newly acquired Contrail SDN platform.[13] The company raised seed funding in addition to a SBIR (Small Business Innovative Research) grant from the National Science Foundation. The company was later renamed Netsil and acquired by Nutanix in 2018 for up to 74 million US dollars in stock.[14] In 2015, Loo also cofounded Termaxia, a big data storage company, where he served as Chief Scientist.[15] In 2020, the company was acquired by Frontiir.[16]

Recognition

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References

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  1. ^ a b Marianne Winslett (2007). "Boon Thau Loo speaks out: on his SIGMOD dissertation award, better networking through datalog, life as an assistant professor, and more". ACM SIGMOD Record. 36 (3): 41–45. doi:10.1145/1324185.1324193. S2CID 44499901.
  2. ^ a b c d "Penn faculty startup raises $100K from Startup PHL angel fund". Philadelphia Business Journal. March 26, 2015.
  3. ^ a b c Reyes, Juliana (6 November 2013). "Meet one of the first faculty startups from Penn's Comp. Sci. department". Technical.ly Philly.
  4. ^ a b c d Loo, Boon Thau (31 August 2018). "How I crossed the academic chasm and entered the startup life". Technical.ly Philly.
  5. ^ "Database Group stays on cutting edge of technology" (PDF). The Daily Pennsylvanian.
  6. ^ Torres, Roberto (25 July 2018). "Penn Engineering launches its first online-only master's program on Coursera". Technical.ly Philly.
  7. ^ Becker, Courtney. "University of Pennsylvania to offer fully-online master's program in computer science". Philadelphia Inquirer.
  8. ^ "dblp: Boon Thau Loo". DBLP - Computer Science Bibliography.
  9. ^ Loo, Boon Thau; Zhou, Wenchao (1 January 2012). Declarative Networking. Morgan & Claypool Publishers. ISBN 9781608456024 – via Google Books.
  10. ^ Green, Todd J.; Huang, Shan Shan; Loo, Boon Thau; Zhou, Wenchao (26 June 2019). Datalog and Recursive Query Processing. Now Publishers. ISBN 9781601987525 – via Google Books.
  11. ^ "Penn awards endowed professorships to four engineering faculty members".
  12. ^ "Expanding Our Reach: Introducing Scholarships". online.seas.upenn.edu.
  13. ^ Surden, Esther (22 July 2015). "Juniper's OpenLab in Bridgewater Having Worldwide Impact".
  14. ^ "Nutanix To Acquire Netsil For Up To $74 Million In Stock (NASDAQ:NTNX) | Seeking Alpha". seekingalpha.com.
  15. ^ Torres, Roberto (21 July 2016). "This stealth-mode company nabbed $100K from StartUp PHL". Technical.ly Philly.
  16. ^ "Myanmar's Frontiir acquires Termaxia, Cloud Storage High-tech Firm in US". markets.businessinsider.com.
  17. ^ "2022 Provost's Teaching Awards". almanac.upenn.edu.
  18. ^ "EDBT 2020 Best Paper Award".
  19. ^ "AFOSR awards grants to 48 scientists and engineers through its Young Investigator Research Program". EurekAlert!.
  20. ^ "SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award – SIGMOD Website".
  21. ^ "Student Award: David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize | EECS at UC Berkeley". www2.eecs.berkeley.edu.
  22. ^ "1999 Winners: Outstanding Undergraduate Awards". archive.cra.org.
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