Professor & University Distinguished Scholar of Computer Science and Engineering, Ohio State University. Director of the NSF-AI Institute, ICICLE. US.

“ICICLE: Intelligent Cyberinfrastructure for Next-Generation AI – Applications using Computing Continuum”

Wednesday 18 February 2026

Abstract

Professor and University Distinguished Scholar of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University. Director of the ICICLE NSF-AI Institute.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming every sector of society. However, there is a massive and ever-growing gap between available AI techniques and their availability to end users across a range of application domains. Existing AI applications are being developed in an ad-hoc manner, lacking coherent, standardized, modular, and reusable infrastructure.

This talk will start with an overview of the ICICLE (Intelligent CyberInfrastructure (CI) with Computational Learning in the Environment), an NSF-AI Institute, to address these challenges. We will demonstrate how ICICLE seeks to be the first and
foremost edge-to-center AI-as-a-service enterprise for the emerging computing continuum, advancing foundational AI research by fostering next-gen CI for AI to support the wholesome democratization of AI through responsible plug-and-play, and extending the usability and usefulness of AI to the wider population. An overview of the co-designing activities at the institute spanning multiple directions, CI (high performance computing, edge-to-cloud/center networking) and AI
(computer vision, knowledge graphs, model commons, and agentic AI) will be presented. Applicability of these solutions for three applications (Animal Ecology, Digital Agriculture, and Smart Food sheds) will be demonstrated.

Bio

DK Panda is a Professor and University Distinguished Scholar of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University.  He is serving as the Director of the ICICLE NSF-AI Institute (https://icicle.ai). He has published over 500 papers. The MVAPICH MPI libraries, designed and developed by his research group (http://mvapich.cse.ohio-state.edu), are currently being used by more than 3,400 organizations worldwide (in 92 countries). More than 1.86 million downloads of this software have taken place from the project’s site. This software is empowering many clusters in the TOP500 list. High-performance and scalable solutions for Deep Learning frameworks and Machine Learning applications from his group are available from https://hidl.cse.ohio-state.edu. Similarly, scalable, and high-performance solutions for Big Data and Data science frameworks are available from https://hibd.cse.ohio-state.edu. Prof. Panda is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE. He is a recipient of the 2022 IEEE Charles Babbage Award and the 2024 IEEE TCPP Outstanding Service and Contributions Award. More details about Prof. Panda are available at http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~panda.

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