Ilkay Altintas

Ilkay Altintas is a Turkish-American data and computer scientist, and researcher in the domain of supercomputing and high-performance computing applications. Since 2015, Altintas has served as chief data science officer of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she has also served as founder and director of the Workflows for Data Science Center of Excellence (WorDS) since 2014, as well as founder and director of the WIFIRE lab. Altintas is also the co-initiator of the Kepler scientific workflow system, an open-source platform that endows research scientists with the ability to readily collaborate, share, and design scientific workflows.

Born in Aydın, Turkey, Altintas attended Middle East Technical University before embarking on a research career. While pursuing her career as a research scientist, she completed her PhD at the University of Amsterdam in 2011. In addition to her work as a research scientist, she is a computer science lecturer at the University of California, San Diego. Altintas is also a co-founder and board member of the Data Science Alliance nonprofit. She serves on the advisory board of several national agencies and companies, and as an editor of peer-reviewed scientific journals.

On October 26, 2003, Altintas experienced California wildfires for the first time, after witnessing the Cedar Fire in San Diego County. The environmental and economic toll that this natural disaster had on the residents of San Diego County inspired Altintas to contribute to improving the then-current systems of managing and predicting wildfires. She allotted much of her time thereafter to learning about California's fire-adapted ecosystem, and the two factors, weather and fuel, that contribute significantly to the spread and dynamic behavior of wildfires. She noted that the behavior of wildfires can be computationally modeled, with data for modeling purposes being pulled from the physical environment (e.g., landscape data, real-time weather information and camera imagery, and remote sensor data). This spurred the creation of Altintas' brainchild, the WIFIRE lab, which received National Science Foundation (NSF) funding from 2013 to 2018. Using scalable computing and dynamic, automated, scientific workflows, data are collected and processed, and can be retrieved and accessed by a diverse array of audiences. The main accomplishments of the WIFIRE lab till date include the deployment of data integration services at the intersection of fire science, data management, and machine learning; real-time data driven fire modeling services (with the help of the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN)); and automated fire modeling workflows and machine learning pipelines. The WIFIRE lab currently serves a community of 130+ organizations, and works to combine data science and fire science to aid in dynamic fire modeling at scale. Altintas has presented on past and ongoing WIFIRE research to a variety of audiences, ranging from stakeholders and policymakers at the California State Capitol to UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS) Science Policy Fellows Program graduate students.

After graduating from Middle East Technical University in 2001, Altintas was hired as a research programmer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). She went on to serve SDSC as the assistant director of the National Laboratory for Advanced Data Research (NLADR), the founder and director of the Scientific Workflow Automation Technologies Laboratory, and deputy coordinator for research. Currently, she is the chief data science officer of SDSC, where she is also the founder and director of the Workflows for Data Science Center of Excellence (WorDS); the founder and director of the WIFIRE lab; and the division director for Cyberinfrastructure Research, Education and Development. The WorDS hub at SDSC serves to promote the utilization and distribution of workflow services in the context of a variety of domains and projects, ranging from the WIFIRE lab (which Altintas founded and currently directs) to the Kepler scientific workflow system (which Altintas serves as the co-initiator of).

Altintas graduated from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey with a bachelor's degree in computer engineering in 1999, and a master's degree in computer engineering in 2001. In 2011, she received a PhD in computational science from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, for her work and contributions toward workflow-driven collaborative science.