Dr. Yelena Yesha is a Distinguished University Professor in the Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Her curriculum vitae stretches over a mile, detailing her accomplishments in technology in the last 25 years. Her triumphs with NASA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Center for Advanced Studies (CAS), IBM, her leadership in the recent launch of the NSF Center for Accelerated Real Time Analytics (CARTA) at UMBC, plus her personal pursuits in developing solutions in healthcare, and now the recent launch of her blockchain company Softhread, are glimpses into the life of a leader intent on changing the world. I met with Dr. Yelena Yesha to learn about the woman and her journey that chronicles the events that have led to her influence today.
This is a Part II of a two-part series. Part I follows Dr. Yelena Yesha’s journey as a youngster in Ukraine to her life and academic pursuits in Canada and the US.
Beyond academia...
Dr. Yesha realized that university wouldn’t be sufficient to realize her dreams. She wanted to build products. She remembers her early passion to pursue innovations in computer-based diagnosis. She would soon be invited to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) at the U.S. Department of Commerce and NASA to give lectures.
I started to consult for NIST and was one of the first people involved in electronic commerce. We were working there on the concept of global marketplaces for small and medium enterprises. Our division was creating an environment where small businesses in the U.S. would be able to compete effectively with large corporations. My role was to look at the architecture and database issues and determine the opportunities.
Dr. Yesha was offered and accepted the directorship of the Center for Applied Information Technology (CAIT) at NIST in charge of the procurement design for electronic commerce systems across all federal agencies. She was only 31 years old.
At that time, Dr. Yesha was still an assistant professor, with a road to tenure. Her intent was to return to secure her tenure.
I was just offered this position in the federal government with the highest technical grade. I wanted to go on leave to do this. It was unusual to leave while you were on tenure track. However, I was adamant I’d get tenure and I promised to bring back more prestige and new opportunities to the university.
Dr. Yesha was granted leave, and assumed her role as the director of CAIT, designing architecture for all the federal agencies to procure products and services through e-commerce.
Dr. Yesha’s meaningful contribution to electronic commerce at a time when it was transformative put her in a position of influence. She represented the U.S. at the G7 Summit, leading the development of resources and co-authored books on Electronic Commerce to train the next generation of scientists, and to determine the impacts on policy, governance, and compliance. Dr. Yesha received funding from the European Union and NSF to build a Master of Science in Electronic Commerce Program across Europe. The electronic commerce courses were run online through IBM, Rutgers, Dalhousie, Toronto and 12 business schools in Europe, and became an important component of the electronic commerce curriculums during the internet boom, 1997-2001. She simultaneously led the development of programs to re-educate the American workforce and train K-12 teachers in the use of internet technology. At this time Dr. Yesha was 32 and received early tenure at UMBC.
Sometime later, Yelena was offered and accepted the directorship of the NASA Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences (CESDIS):
The candidates I competed with were all men – and were much more well known at the time. I was gaining increased prominence for my work at NIST and NASA, however my contenders were already shining stars. I was eventually selected for the position and this was, by far, my most demanding role, and the male-dominated environment at NASA during this time made it even more challenging. At the center, I inherited approximately 28 active projects, and managed a large number of Ph.D. level scientists including astrophysicists. We were equipped with the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world, attached to the largest unclassified data archive in the world.
In 5 years at NASA, Dr. Yesha was able to build successes overseeing:
- the development of Beowulf, a computer system that revolutionized high-performance parallel computing, a system used in almost every university and research lab worldwide
- the development of major components of the Linux operating system, which were later commercialized by Red Hat
- the development of the Global Legal Information Network (GLIN) to provide satellite internet hybrid communication links between countries to exchange documents to support international treaties and laws
- the development of technology that was used to repair the Hubble Space Telescope
IBM calls...
Jacob Slonim was the founder of the Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) at IBM Toronto Lab. He learned of Dr. Yesha’s work on electronic commerce and invited her to come to IBM, coaxing her to participate in research on electronic commerce and database. Dr. Yesha began to make her mark at IBM by participating in the development of DB2, a scalable relational database system able to run on a number of authoritative operating systems like Linux, Windows, etc. Dr. Yesha’s influence prompted commercial adoption by NASA. She also contributed to other notable projects like Eclipse, an IT integrated development environment (IDE), which is now the most widely used Java IDE; In 2000 Dr. Yesha co-edited (with Weidong Kou) the very first IBM Press book, “Electronic Commerce Technology Trends: Challenges and Opportunities”.
The Multicore revolution began in 2007. Rod Adkins, Senior Vice President of IBM at the time, gave UMBC the mandate of benchmarking and evangelizing the technology, with Dr. Yesha as the Principal Investigator. By 2009, through UMBC, Dr. Yesha and Dr. Milt Halem together founded the National Science Foundation Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research (CHMPR), a 15-year award that promoted a consortium including universities, industry, and government to work on programs of national significance that have commercial value.
Some of CHMPR accomplishments Dr. Yesha oversaw include:
- gridding and calculating the first decadal global surface temperatures based on satellite data for 2001-2010
- being the first to demonstrate, during the Deep Water Horizon oil spill, the use of social media data (about tarballs) for improving tarball landfall prediction by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) operational model
Dr. Yesha recounts her passion when she first came to Canada: using information technology to address major healthcare challenges.
I had a significant role in designing the operating room of the future, building surgical simulations to train the next generation of surgeons. Funding that I received from several agencies enabled me to do this work. This is what I wanted to do all my life... Now I can.
Dr. Yesha, not one to limit her opportunities, was asked by a colleague to bridge the gap between computer science and medical research in a way that hadn’t yet been achieved. In 2004, Dr. Yesha began working on personalized medicine to determine new ways the clinical decision support systems could enable more patient-centric solutions. Using machine learning, Dr. Yesha and her collaborators were able to tease out specific features pertinent to individual diseases while mitigating any confusion of interactions among several diseases, and, in the process, improve the accuracy of diagnosis.
Once this was completed, the team focused on relevant treatment for patient-specific indications. By combining the patient’s clinical records and diagnosis with his/her genomic information, the team used machine learning to bring an internet feed directly to the physician, which included search results for the most recent and relevant clinical findings and articles from publications in medical journals and CAS, etc.,
The importance of AI for medical innovation is on the rise… We started working on the ability to combine clinical and genetic records. By combining computer science and medicine, we will be able to build a clinical decision support system that produces a holistic view of the patient, fusing clinical and genetic information and using the power of real-time computing to empower the physician at the point of care… This would free up the doctor to focus on quality patient care from better information.
Overhauling the future of data analytics...
Dr. Yesha realized what the industry wanted:
Big Data is too broad a term. So I proposed the development of a new center to capture more actionable knowledge from Big Data in real time: the Center for Accelerated Real Time Analytics (CARTA). The current Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research is now in year 10. I decided to phase it out it and start CARTA.
In early 2018, CARTA competed for and won a 15-year NSF funding. Its vision is to enable real-time analytics leveraged by smart data. The real value to the industry will be the “automated ingestion and simultaneous analytics” of Big Datasets, in particular for cyberspace, healthcare, IoT and self-learning. Dr. Yelena’s belief is that the future society will be enabled by 3 technologies:
Three transformative technologies will revolutionize the way we use, teach, consume and enable computing capabilities: 1) Quantum Computing 2) AI and 3) Blockchain. These technologies are here to stay and will enable significant changes to society. Quantum computing as a platform will change the way developers program computers, while undoubtedly dramatically improving performance. This will require new training for programmers and effective users of the platform. For industry, the leap forward will be evident. As well, AI, at a mass market level, will make its biggest impact in robotics. Blockchain will have an influence in reforming many aspects of computing. And the prime ROI will be achieved in the supply chain, Internet of Things (IoT) and cybersecurity. Most blockchain solutions will require customization based on domain expertise. This gap has motivated us to come up with a unique solution.
Spearheading new technologies through commercialization is a natural passage that Dr. Yesha has undertaken with vigor. In June 2018, Dr. Yesha launched her new startup called SofThread, commercializing a permissioned blockchain technology with the purpose of solving some of its challenges today.
There is enormous demand for blockchain tech for the supply chain. In the future, blockchain will gain traction very quickly. There is expressed interest in our solution and we are currently testing with a few use cases. Marrying this technology with the speed of Quantum and insights from AI is an eventuality. The results will be profound.
Happily, Dr. Yesha feels excited about her current pursuits. With all the technology that has been brought to bear, Dr. Yesha has a view of the future:
The next five years will revolutionize the way we do business. We will need to teach computing for the next generation using Quantum with AI called Accelerated AI. From my experience, computer vision and machine learning have proven to be effective but we are still in the process of studying and truly understanding cognitive science.
Dr. Yelena Yesha’s success came from her tenacious spirit, despite the challenges she faced, and it persists throughout her academic and industry career. She has never relented and is determined to tackle some of the biggest challenges to enable progress in government, in healthcare, and for humanity.
