Herlocker and Pardalos selected for CS&E’s Distinguished Alumni Award
The Department of Computer Science and Engineering has selected alums Jon Herlocker (Ph.D. ’00) and Panos Pardalos (Ph.D. ’85) for our biennial Distinguished Alumni Award. The award recognizes CS&E alumni who have spent their professional and research careers contributing pivotal work to the greater computer science community. They were presented with the awards during our 50th Anniversary Celebration dinner on November 22, 2019.
Jon Herlocker
Jon Herlocker is an industry-leading technologist experienced in both on-premises enterprise software and consumer SaaS businesses. He has deep technical experience in multiple areas including designing and operating scale-out distributed systems and applying machine learning and data analytics to decision problems. He also has significant experience and training in human-computer interaction and user experience design.
Prior to co-founding Tignis, he was Vice President and CTO of VMware’s Cloud Management Business Unit. Other positions include CTO of Mozy, and CTO of EMC’s Cloud Services division. Jon is an experienced entrepreneur having founded two other startup companies. He is a former tenured professor of Computer Science at Oregon State University, and his highly-cited academic research work was awarded the prestigious 2010 ACM Software System Award for contributions to the field of recommendation systems.
Jon holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota, and a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Lewis and Clark College.
Panos Pardalos
Panos Pardalos is a Distinguished Professor and the Paul and Heidi Brown Preeminent Professor in the Departments of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida, and a world renowned leader in Global Optimization, Mathematical Modeling, and Data Sciences. He is a Fellow of AAAS, AIMBE, and INFORMS and was awarded the 2013 Constantin Caratheodory Prize of the International Society of Global Optimization. In addition, Dr. Pardalos has been awarded the 2013 EURO Gold Medal prize bestowed by the Association for European Operational Research Societies. This medal is the preeminent European award given to Operations Research (OR) professionals for “scientific contributions that stand the test of time.”
Dr. Pardalos has been awarded a prestigious Humboldt Research Award (2018-2019). The Humboldt Research Award is granted in recognition of a researcher’s entire achievements to date – fundamental discoveries, new theories, insights that have had significant impact on their discipline.
Dr. Pardalos is also a Member of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Academy of Spain, and the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He is the Founding Editor of Optimization Letters, Energy Systems, and Co-Founder of the International Journal of Global Optimization, and Computational Management Science. He has published over 500 journal papers, and edited/authored over 200 books. He is one of the most cited authors in computer sciences and has graduated 63 PhD students so far. Details can be found in www.ise.ufl.edu/pardalos.
Please join the department in extending our congratulations to Jon and Panos.