Renowned artificial intelligence and high-performance computing expert Jeremy Kepner has received the distinguished honor of being named a 2021 SIAM Fellow by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. This prestigious recognition celebrates Kepner's groundbreaking contributions to interactive parallel computing, matrix-based graph algorithms, sustainable supercomputing solutions, and advanced big data analytics. As a Lincoln Laboratory Fellow in the Cyber Security and Information Sciences Division and a research affiliate at MIT's Mathematics Department, Kepner continues to push the boundaries of computational innovation.
Throughout his impressive career at Lincoln Laboratory since 1998, Kepner has consistently revolutionized computing capabilities both within the laboratory and across the broader scientific community. His extensive publications, leadership roles in national conference committees, and regional initiatives to democratize supercomputing access have solidified his reputation as a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.
"For over two decades, Jeremy has been instrumental in advancing high-performance computing, from supercomputers to embedded systems," notes David Martinez, a Lincoln Laboratory fellow and former division head who collaborated closely with Kepner. "His innovative approach to signal processing on sparse data has transformed how we analyze social networks and optimize parallel computing environments, making significant contributions to AI development and implementation."
At Lincoln Laboratory, Kepner spearheaded the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Embedded Computing Software Initiative, establishing the Vector, Signal and Image Processing Library standard now widely used in DoD sensor systems. His groundbreaking inventions include MatlabMPI software in 1999 and the architecture of pMatlab (Parallel Matlab Toolbox) in 2001, both of which have been adopted by thousands of scientists and engineers worldwide. Under his direction, the Parallel Vector Tile Optimizing Library (PVTOL) earned the prestigious R&D 100 Award in 2011.
"Jeremy's visionary leadership has positioned him at the forefront of high-performance computing innovation for the past twenty years," states Stephen Rejto, head of Lincoln Laboratory's Cyber Security and Information Sciences Division. "His contributions have been invaluable to advancing our laboratory's mission in artificial intelligence and computational research."
Kepner's commitment to sustainable computing led him to establish the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, the world's largest and most environmentally friendly open research data center powered by hydropower. This initiative has dramatically enhanced MIT's computing capabilities while significantly reducing its carbon footprint. He also founded the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center, home to New England's most powerful supercomputer, and co-established the U.S. Air Force-MIT AI Accelerator in 2019, which combines MIT's expertise with Air Force resources to accelerate artificial intelligence research and development.
"These honors reflect the collective achievements of our exceptional Lincoln team, to whom I am profoundly grateful," Kepner acknowledges.
Recently, Kepner has focused his expertise on graph analytics and big data, creating the innovative Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model (D4M), a novel database management language and schema now widely implemented in both Lincoln Laboratory and government big data systems.
His diverse publications span multiple disciplines including data mining, databases, high-performance computing, graph algorithms, cybersecurity, visualization, cloud computing, random matrix theory, abstract algebra, and bioinformatics. Among his notable works are two SIAM bestselling books: "Parallel MATLAB for Multicore and Multinode Computers" and "Graph Algorithms in the Language of Linear Algebra." In 2018, he co-authored "Mathematics of Big Data" with Hayden Jananthan, published as part of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory series by MIT Press.
A SIAM member since his graduate studies at Princeton University, Kepner has actively contributed to the SIAM community through various leadership roles. He has served as vice chair of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, advised a SIAM student section, and facilitated SIAM's affiliation with the High Performance Extreme Computing (HPEC) conference. Under his guidance, HPEC evolved into an IEEE conference in 2012, further establishing its significance in the high-performance computing community.
Kepner's achievement as a SIAM Fellow marks a historic milestone as the first Lincoln Laboratory researcher and the ninth from MIT to receive this distinguished recognition.
