Workshop Invited Speakers

Karen Salomé Caballero Mora

Latin American Women on HPC

Born in Mexico City, she studied Physics at the Faculty of Sciences at UNAM. When she finished, she studied for a Doctorate in Natural Sciences, with a specialty in Astroparticles at the Technological Institute of Karslruhe, Germany, with an investigation on the composition of ultra-energetic cosmic rays. Later, she did a postdoctoral stay at Pennsylvania State University, United States of America, working on the IceCube experiment, studying neutrinos from the cosmos. In her second postdoctoral stay, she carried out studies on sloping showers at the Pierre Auger Observatory at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Back in Mexico, for his third postdoctoral stay, at CINVESTAV Zacatenco, he joined the HAWC experiment, in which he has carried out various analyzes, referring to cosmic rays, gamma rays, search for new sources of gamma rays in the galactic plane, and dark matter.

She joined the Faculty of Sciences in Physics and Mathematics of the Autonomous University of Chiapas in 2014, where she has also worked on the MATHUSLA (CERN) proposal, and on the LAGO and Escaramujo experiments. As part of her work, it is necessary to have High Performance Computing, for which she has been strongly involved in the process of creating the Regional Laboratory for High Performance Computing, LARCAD, of UNACH. She currently has several scientific and academic management positions (director of the FCFM, and President of the DPyC (Division of Particles and Fields) of the SMF (Mexican Society of Physics)). In 2014 she was one of the winners of the "For Women in Science" award from L'ÓREAL, AMC, CONALMEX.

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Judith Percino Zacarías

Latin American Women on HPC

Doctorate in Chemistry of Macromolecules in 1991 at the Kazakh Institute of Sciences. Since 1992 she is part of the Autonomous University of Puebla, creating the Group of Polymers. To date there are a total of 112 indexed publications and 1,079 citations, and there have been trained 33 thesis students: 20 Lic., 7 M. en C., 6 Doc., and 5 postdoctoral researchers. Several research projects funded at the institutional level have been developed and federal. The most significant is the project for the creation of the National Laboratory of Southeast Mexico Supercomputer (LNS-BUAP) in 2015, contributing to the development of the scientific community at BUAP and higher education institutions in Mexico.

With the infrastructure of the LNS, projects have been developed such as: "Theoretical Characterization and Experimental Physicochemical Properties and Molecular Structure of Compounds of low and High Molecular Weight” and “Supramolecular-computational studies of derivatives of unsaturated acrylonitrile: polymorphs - optical properties and application of Schrödinger software to the design of materials for organic electronics” with the collaboration of Dr. Subbiah Thamotharan, SASTRA Deemed University, and Dr. Perumal Venkatesan, Barathidasan University.

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Raquel Torres Peralta

Latin American Women on HPC

Professor-Researcher in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Coordinator of the Information Systems Engineering career at the University of Sonora with a doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Arizona, specialist in Machine Learning and Data Mining. She currently supports projects aimed at preventive medicine and health.

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Jose Maria Cela

HPC and Energy

Cela is PhD. in Telecommunication Engineering from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) and Professor of Computer Architecture at same university since 1996. He is director of the Department of Computer Applications in Science and Engineering at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) since 2007. He has directed more than 25 R & D projects, has published over 40 articles and has participated in almost a 100 international conferences. His research is related to numerical simulation in engineering and high performance computing (HPC). In recent years, his research has focused on the energy sector. He directs the joint research center Repsol-BSC. In addition, he is responsible for the macro-research project with Iberdrola renewables and several other projects in the field of fusion energy.

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Salvador Elías Venegas Andraca

Advanced Computing Trends

Salvador E. Venegas-Andraca is a professor of Computer Science and head of the Quantum Information Processing group at Tecnologico de Monterrey and the founding director of The Unconventional Computing Lab.

Professor Venegas-Andraca holds a DPhil in Physics (2006) and an MSc by research in Computer Vision (2002), both degrees awarded by the University of Oxford, as well as an MBA (Hon) and a BSc (Hon) in Digital Electronics and Computer Science, these two last degrees awarded by Tecnoloìgico de Monterrey. Professor Venegas- Andraca has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and Yucatan University.

Professor Venegas-Andraca's work is focused on understanding all scientific and societal aspects of computation as well as on contributing towards the economic development of modern society based on science and technology. He is a leading scientist in the field of quantum walks, cofounder of the field Quantum Image Processing and his research interests include quantum algorithms as well as the algorithmic analysis of NP-hard/NP-complete problems. Professor Venegas-Andraca is the author of Quantum Walks for Computer Scientists (2008), the first book ever written on the scientific field of quantum walks, and the co-author of "Quantum Image Processing" (Springer, 2020), the first book ever written fully focused on storing, processing and retrieving visual information using quantum mechanical systems. He has published more than 50 scientific papers with more than two thousand citations in Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science.

Professor Venegas-Andraca has received several awards for his scientific achievements, among them: member of the Quantum Computing Network of the World Economic Forum, fellow of the Mexican Academy of Sciences, Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery, fellow of the Mexican Academy of Computer Science, member of the Mexican Society for the Public Communication of Science, SNI 2 (physics and mathematics) of Mexico’s National Network of Researchers, Oxford University Chancellor Fund’s Award and Silver Medal at the British Council International Students Awards.

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Luis Eliécer Cadenas

HPC Collaboration between Europe and Latin America

Executive Director - RedCLARA Borned in Venezuela and with a vast experience in academic networks and the Latin American ICT scene, Luis Eliécer Cadenas started to work as Executive Director of RedCLARA on August 1st, 2017.

Computer engineer with postgraduate studies in economics, telematics, networking and computer science, with almost 30 years of experience in information technologies and telecommunications field both in the private and public domains, in his professional career the Venezuelan Luis Eliécer Cadenas has sought to be an agent of change, growth and development of people and organizations through information and communication technologies. In this line, his role as co-founder, President and member of the Board of Directors of the National Academic Network of Venezuela, REACCIUN, in which he had a central participation between 1996 and 2000 was fundamental. As President of REACCIUN, Cadenas sought to align the organization , infrastructure and resources to the needs of the universities and research and academics centers of his country, achieving the development of the first national physical network (financed with funds from the Inter-American Development Bank), connecting 17 public universities, increasing the availability of bandwidth for the scientific and academic communitties and making it a stable and reliable service.

In the same line of motivation and personal development, Cadenas was President of the Latin American Research Network Association (Enredo 1998-1999), member of the board of the National Supercomputing Center of Venezuela (Cecalcula, 1997-1999) and of the Technological Park of Sartenejas (1997-1999). When he decided to move to the private sector, he stayed related to the academic spectrum while leading the strategy for Cisco's Academic Network Program (2000-2006), then, motivated by adding new knowledge to his expertise, Cadenas moved within Cisco to the commercial arena, serving as Account Manager for the public sector of Venezuela (2006-2009), then for service providers (2009-2013), until 2014 when he moved with his family to Guatemala to lead the business strategy of the company with America Movil in Central America. Until becoming CEO of RedCLARA on August 1, 2017, Luis Eliécer Cadenas held the position of Account Manager for Claro Central in Cisco.

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Pedro Vieira Alberto

HPC Collaboration between Europe and Latin America

Pedro Alberto is a Physics Professor at Universidade de Coimbra with reasearch interests in Relativistic Quantum Mechanics, Computational Physics and Physics simulations for teaching.

He has been the head of Laboratório de Computação Avançada da Universidade de Coimbra (UC-LCA) since its inauguration in 2002. He has been involved in several HPC activities, including cluster management and procurement, outreach and dissemination, organization of HPC training events, lecturing advanced computer classes, as well as national and international research projects related to HPC, including RISC projects for HPC collaboration between Europe and Latin America. He has been the coordinator of the Portuguese participation in the European Advanced Computing Infrastructure PRACE since its beginning in 2008 and is the Portuguese delegate to the PRACE Council. He is the task leader for Training and Skills Development within the EuroHPC EuroCC project (Portuguese branch).

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Marcela Mercado Reyes

BioCARLA

Bacteriologist, with a master’s degree in Clinical Epidemiology and a specialist in Field Epidemiology. She is an associate researcher with more than 20 years of experience in basic and applied research in public and private institutions. She has been a researcher in projects related to vector- borne diseases, evaluation of health technologies, analysis of diagnostic tests, maternal and perinatal health, and vaccine effectiveness, among others, research that has resulted in more than 40 publications in indexed journals. 

She has had teaching experience in undergraduate and postgraduate university programs. During her working experience she has conducted several research projects related to emerging infections caused by Aedes spp. In Colombia, such as “Intensified surveillance of pregnant women with Zika”, “Evolutionary analysis of viral genome sequences to establish the determinants of Zika virus transmission in Colombia”, “Determination of the characteristics associated with mortality due to Chikungunya virus” among others. 

Currently, she works as the Public Health Research Director at the Colombian National Institute of Health. During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic she led the SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence study in the country, the development of the ELIPSE-COL test for COVID-19 and currently coordinates the National SARS-CoV-2 Genomic Characterization Program.

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Antonio Russo

Good practices in HPC Management

Antonio Russo received his Masters in 2015 from the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, France, in Computer Applications (MCA) Computer Software Engineering.

He has a vast experience in large systems deployment, from migration of whole municipalities to FLOSS (Bolzano, Bull) to TOP500 clusters (EDF, France).

He worked for the academia for CONICET in Argentina, and he is currently HPC Systems Specialist Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

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Eliu Huerta

Americas HPC Collaboration

Dr. Eliu Huerta is Lead for Translational AI and Computational Scientist in the Data Science and Learning Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He is also a CASE Senior Scientist affiliated with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He is a theoretical astrophysicist, mathematician and computer scientist with broad research interests. He has done pioneering work at the interface of physics-inspired AI, scientific visualization and extreme scale computing for multi-messenger astrophysics, cosmology, observational astronomy, and large scale simulations that describe multi-scale and multi-physics phenomena. 

Huerta received a Master of Advanced Study in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and a PhD in Theoretical Astrophysics from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. He leads several NSF- and DOE-funded interdisciplinary and multi-institutional projects that focus on disruptive AI applications and advanced computing for big-data experiments. He enjoys doing translational AI research across disciplines, industry, finance and tech. His h-index is 73 and has more than 50,000 citations.

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