Auroop Ganguly Named Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery
CEE Professor Auroop Ganguly was recently recognized as a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for his significant contributions. Ganguly was elevated for “foundational advances, sustained service, and entrepreneurial accomplishments in climate data mining and machine learning.”
“This recognition excited me most of all because my training was not in the computing field but in civil and environmental engineering.” Ganguly said. “I was elected a Fellow of the ASCE in 2019 and that was exhilarating. However, this is rather intriguing in the sense that someone who is sort of from outside the discipline got this ACM recognition. It speaks to the interdisciplinary nature of what we do. I think there are many other faculty in our department – many much better than me – who could get similar awards: both in their fields of original training but also beyond.”
Ganguly’s foundational advances in computer science and engineering include special temporal machine learning, examination of big data and small data challenges such as for climate extremes, hybrid physics-AI systems that integrate process knowledge and numerical models with AI or data-driven systems to the new age of data and artificial intelligence, as well as graphical and network models for climate science and impact analysis. He has published in climate and AI or data science journals, high-impact interdisciplinary journals, and in top-tier peer-reviewed conferences in computer science, with a few of the latter having won best paper awards.
“None of these foundational advances are me alone. It has always been joint with my students, postdocs, visiting professors, and research scholars, and often with peer collaborators across disciplinary boundaries.”
Ganguly’s sustained service includes the organization of workshops to push new ideas into the mainstream in areas such as climate data mining, AI for fragile earth, and knowledge discovery from sensor data. He was also recognized for his authorship of the textbook Critical Infrastructures Resilience: Policy and Engineering Principles and edited books on Knowledge Discovery from Sensor Data.
Ganguly’s entrepreneurial accomplishments include the co-founding of urban climate risk analytics startup risQ with his former PhD student Evan Kodra. The company combines physics and data sciences to inform climate risk for urban financing. The startup was acquired by Intercontinental Exchange, a Fortune 500 company that owns the New York Stock Exchange, in 2021 for an undisclosed sum. Additionally, Ganguly is an advisor at Zeus AI, a startup founded by two of his former PhD students, Kate Duffy and Thomas (“TJ”) Vandal, based on NASA funding. Duffy and Vandal, both former NASA scientists, founded Zeus AI to utilize satellite data and AI for weather forecasting with a focus on the renewable energy sector. Ganguly has also contributed to local assessments like the Climate Ready Boston, national scale assessments, as well as global United Nations panels. He has been widely cited and quoted by the mainstream media across the world. His former students and mentees are widely successful in the industry, as entrepreneurs, in government-owned laboratories, and in academia.
For all these contributions, Auroop Ganguly was recognized by the ACM, which states, “ACM highlights how individual computing professionals maintain the health and growth of a global scientific society through membership and active engagement with their colleagues… a Distinguished Member is expected to have served as a mentor and role model to younger professionals.”