About
Dr. Carlos A. Varela received his B.S. with honors, M.S., and Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Varela is Associate Editor of the ACM Computing Surveys journal, the IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, and the IEEE Internet of Things Journal. He has authored the book "Programming Distributed Computing Systems: A Foundational Approach" (MIT Press, 2013). He was the General Chair for CCGrid 2016. He is PC Co-Chair for the InfoSymbiotics/Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems (DDDAS2022) conference and was the PC Chair for the 2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Cluster, Cloud, and Internet Computing (CCGrid 2020), the 2011 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Cluster, Cloud, and Grid Computing (CCGrid 2011), the 2012 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2012,) and the ACM AGERE! Workshop on Programming based on Actors, Agents and Decentralized Control at SPLASH 2014 and 2015. Dr. Varela has given 80 invited talks, including 12 plenary lectures on his research at international and national venues. He has been a member of 100 conference and workshop Program Committees. He has supervised seven Ph.D. students and 19 M.S. students. He and his students have received Best Paper awards at HPDC-GECO'2006, eScience'2007, CCGrid'2007, CLEI'2010, CCGrid'2016, DASC'2019. He is also a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, and industry awards from IBM, Google, Amazon, and PSEG. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Dr. Varela is also an instrument-rated private pilot with over 1100 hours of flight experience, including cross-country trips from NY to CA, IL, TX, and FL. His current research interests include safer flight systems, software verification, cloud and edge computing, middleware for adaptive distributed systems, and concurrent programming models and languages. Prof. Varela was on sabbatical visiting GE Global Research's Control and Optimization's High Assurance Systems group at Niskayuna, NY, the University of Los Andes at Bogota, Colombia, and PUC-Rio at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. For more information on Prof. Varela's group's research, please visit the Worldwide Computing Lab at http://wcl.cs.rpi.edu/
Research
My current main research interest is the investigation of fundamental distributed computing principles to enable smarter data-driven aero-space systems. In particular, I am interested in performing fundamental research leading to an Internet of Planes platform, providing pilots and autonomous vehicles with unprecedented levels of real-time collaborative situational awareness using edge computing on distributed sensor data. I am also investigating safety envelopes as a formalization of statistical properties of data streams that guarantee verifiable behavior of a data-driven model and evaluating their applicability to a smart wing. I expect fundamental research results in these directions to be also applicable to other vehicle networks (e.g., of self-driving cars), and to distributed data stream analytics in other domains (e.g., health informatics.)
Software Verification, Programming Languages and Software Engineering, Distributed Computing and Middleware, Computational Science and Engineering
Publications
The following is a selection of recent publications in Scopus. Carlos Varela has 106 indexed publications in the subjects of Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering.