K. Vairavan graduated from the University of Madras in 1962 with a BE degree in Electrical Engineering. He obtained his MSdegree in Applied Science with an emphasis on computers from the George Washington University in 1965, where he also worked as a computer programmer and a research assistant in a NASA sponsored project performed in collaboration with the GoddardSpaceFlightCenter, Maryland. In this project, he developed software to analyze data on sun spots gathered by the satellite Orbiting Geophysical Observatory (OGO).
Vairavan obtained his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame in 1968 under the direction of Professor James L. Massey. His doctoral thesis was in the area of Finite Memory Finite State Machines. His research was supported by grants from NASA and NSF.
At Notre Dame, Vairavan worked as a research assistant, teaching assistant, lecturer and a research associate at different periods of his studies between 1965 and 1968. As a research associate, he helped develop software to test the performance of error correcting coding techniques (called Sequential Decoding) used in deep-space communication.
Vairavan started his professional career as a Junior Engineer in the Madras State Electricity Board, India after his graduation in 1962. His primary work dealt with the installation of electrostatic precipitators in thermal electric power stations in Madras (now known as Chennai) to reduce air pollution.
Following his graduate studies at the George Washington University and at the University of Notre Dame, Vairavan joined the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering in 1968. He was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 1971, and Full Professor in 1976. He served as the Chair for Computer Science in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from 1987 to 2002.
In 1970, he also held an appointment as a Member of Technical Staff in Bell Telephone Laboratories, (on a visit from UWM). At Bell Laboratories, he worked with the Electronic Switching System (ESS) 1A processor design group, and developed computer aided design techniques for the design of electronic switching systems. He also made one of the earliest contributions to the development of formal descriptions of digital hardware using a programming language (APL).
In 1980, Vairavan held a Visiting Professor appointment at the University of Hiroshima, Japanwhere he taught an advanced graduate course and conducted NSF funded research in Parallel Computation. He also gave invited talks at other Japanese universities and at several industrial research laboratories including NEC and NTT.
In his academic career at UWM, Vairavan has taught many courses in Electrical Engineering and in Computer Science including: circuits , electronics, digital logic, digital logic laboratory, introductory computer programming, computer organization, computer architecture, switching and automata theory, special topics in Computer Science, and advanced topics in Computer Science. He also developed several of the above courses. Vairavan helped to start the digital systems track in the Electrical Engineering graduate programs, which became a precursor to graduate programs in Computer Science. Vairavan also helped develop and implement the MS program in Computer Science and the Computer Science concentration in the Engineering PhD program.
Recently Vairavan has made additional contributions to curriculum and program development in
Computer Engineering(BS), Applied Mathematics and Computer Science(BS), and Medical Informatics(PhD) (Details can be found under the listing for service and professional contributions.)
Vairavan has supervised or co-supervised several PhD students in Electrical Engineering and in Computer Science. He has also supervised numerous MS theses students, and undergraduate and graduate independent study projects. Vairavan has had the privilege of teaching more than 3000 students, including nearly 2500 undergraduate students, in his various classes during his tenure at UWM. (See a list of his graduate students and their theses titles.)
Throughout his career, Vairavan has immensely enjoyed teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses. He has also enjoyed interactions with graduate as well as undergraduate students. He derives particular pleasure in following the careers of the students he has helped to educate, and appreciates greatly the periodic communications he receives from many alumni.
Vairavan has been engaged in both fundamental and applied research spanning many areas in Computer Science and in Electrical Engineering. The research areas include digital systems, finite state machines, parallel computation, distributed systems, and software complexity. Vairavan has been supported by several grants from NSF for research in finite memory finite state machines, and in parallel computation and scheduling. He has also received industrial support for research in digital systems, and in software quality measures called software complexity metrics.
Vairavan’s research has been reported through publications in journals, conference proceedings and books of selected papers, including the following: IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Information and Control (now known as Information and Computation), Journal of the ACM, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computation and Distributed Computing: Concepts and Implementations. (See a representative list of his research publications.)
His early research in computer aided digital design and in formal descriptions of digital hardware was conducted when he was on a visit to the Bell Telephone Laboratories and was reported in a Bell Telephone Laboratories Technical Memorandum.
Vairavan’s extensive research in finite state machines addresses several fundamental and applied problems related to an important class of these machines called finite memory machines. These models of digital systems are a superset of the well known linear finite state machines. Their many applications include encoding and decoding for error-correcting codes used in digital communication, and in data compression. His research contributions in finite memory machines have appeared in many journals and conference proceedings including the IEEE Transactions on Computers, Electronics Letters, and Information and Control.
His research on software complexity metrics and their relation to software quality was primarily experimental and was conducted with the cooperation of several companies including GE Medical Systems (now known as GE Healthcare), Johnson Controls, and Rockwell Automation. In a widely cited paper, Vairavan and his student Lind studied experimentally the relationship between complexity measures for more than two million lines of code developed at GE Medical Systems and the errors detected in the corresponding software. The results pointed to certain optimum values for software complexity metrics for minimizing error-density. This work and a similar study of real-time building automation software developed at Johnson Controls with his student Jensen have been reported in the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. In a related thesis, Vairavan’s student Knutzen studied the relationship between algorithmic complexity and the software complexity of programs to implement selected algorithms.
Much of Vairavan’s early research in the area of parallel computation was done in collaboration with DeMillo and many graduate students. A significant part of this research was fundamental. It established a bridge between the vastly theoretical parallel program schemata of Karp and Miller, and the practical parallel program scheduling work of Ramamurthyand Chandy. This project supported by NSFprovided a formal framework to study the transformation of sequential programs to parallel forms suitable for execution in a multiprocessor system. It also studied the computational complexity of the problem of program transformations, and techniques for such transformation.
In another NSFfunded project, Vairavan studied the parallel scheduling of tasks and introduced a modification of the Coffman-Graham algorithm for parallel task scheduling. The two algorithms have the same time complexity (polynomial time) while the modification provided optimality of performance for task systems not optimally scheduled by the Coffman-Graham algorithm. In a subsequent collaborative study with Susarla and Bashir, Vairavan applied rigorous statistical methods to study the average performance of these efficient parallel scheduling algorithms for problems known to be NP-complete. The results of these projects in parallel computation and scheduling were published in a number of venues including the Journal of the ACM, the IEEE Transactions on Computers, the Proceedings of the Sixth ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 74), and the book: DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING: Concepts and Implementations (1984).
Vairavan has also collaborated with (i) Yu, Fu and Tesch in a study of the applications of a knowledge-based approach to electrical energy management systems, and (ii) Breitbartin the investigation of the computational complexity of algorithms to minimize algebraic expressions for Boolean functions. The results have been reported in conferences and in the IEEE Transactions on Power Systems and the IEEE Transactions on Computers respectively.
Vairavan’s earlier interests in parallel computation and scheduling led to collaborative research with Hosseini and other colleagues, in modeling and studying the topic of load balancing in distributed computing systems. The extensive analytical and simulation studies introduced the novel concept of graph-coloring of edges (representing communicating links) to balance the loads in decentralized distributed system modeled by a directed graph where the nodes are the processors.
Collaborative research studies with Hosseini have also examined reliability in distributed systems and routing protocols in ad-hoc wireless networks. Other collaborators dealing with different aspects of this research in distributed systems were Litow, Malkawi, McPherson, and Goyal. Several PhD students including Joshi, Wolffe, Abulnaja, Huang and El-Afandi also contributed to this research. The research results were reported in a number of venues including the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computation, conference proceedings and books of selected research papers.
Vairavan’s research interests continue to include parallel and distributed systems and networks. He has also expanded his interests to include Medical Informatics, and in particular Medical Data Mining.
Vairavan was appointed as the first Computer Science Chair at UWM in 1987. He served in this capacity for many years, helping to guide Computer Science Program development through activities that included: faculty and graduate student recruitment, academic program development, graduate program direction and the guidance of the first four external Computer Science graduate program reviews, creation and guidance of the Computer Science Industrial Advisory Council, and the pursuit of external funds to support the Program and students.
In addition to Computer Science academic program development activities, Vairavan has contributed to the development of several other academic programs including the BS program in Computer Engineering and a PhD program in Medical Informatics. The latter is aninterdisciplinary program developed as a collaborative effort between five academic units at UWM, including the College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS), and the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW). He led the efforts of a team of UWM and MCW faculty in developing this doctoral program and getting it approved by the UW Board of Regents in 2004 and implementing it in 2005. He served as the first Chair of the Medical Informatics PhD Program Steering Committee, and along with. Charles Kahn of MCW, Vairavan was appointed as a Co-Director of the program.
At UWM, Vairavan has served in numerous college and university-wide committees including the following: CEAS Strategic Planning Committee, Divisional Executive Committee for the Natural Sciences (several terms), Graduate School Research Committee, Faculty Rights and Responsibility Committee, and the University Relations Committee (chairing it one year), and Search Committees for Deans and Vice-Chancellor for Development.
Vairavan has been an active member of the IEEE Computer Society. He was a founding member of its Milwaukee Chapter in 1972, and has also served as the Vice-chairman and Chairmanof the chapter. He was a member of the Computer Society’s technical committees on Foundations of Computing and Computer Architecture. Vairavan was named a National Distinguished Visitor for the IEEE Computer Society. He has also served as an ABET accreditation visitor for the accreditation of Computer Engineering programs. In 1984, he received the IEEE Milwaukee Section Memorial Award for “Outstanding contributions to electrical engineering education, to the technical literature and to the IEEE Computer Society”.
His professional contributions have also included reviews of books and book manuscripts for McGraw Hill, IEEE Computer Press and Prentice Hall. He has also served as a reviewer of grant proposals (NSF), and research papers for several journals including the IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and Information and Control and many international conferences.
Vairavan has served on program and organizing committees for numerous international conferences. He has also organized and chaired several technical panel sessions. Noteworthy examples of these conference sessions are: (1) Computing in Developing Countries at the National Computer Conference , New York in 1978 that attracted numerous participants from the developing countries; (2) Microcomputer Architectures-What Next?, at the National Computer Conference held in Chicago in 1981.(This was a joint Japan-USA panel organized in cooperation with Tadao Ichikawa of Hiroshima University. It included the top microcomputer manufacturers of both countries who were brought together in a forum to discuss the future of microcomputers. This remarkable panel session included Justin Ratner of Intel and it pointed to the enormous success of Intel’s microprocessor products in the years that followed.) and (3) Measurement and Metrics at the 26th Annual IEEE Computer Software Applications Conference held at Oxford University, in UK in 2002.
Vairavan’s non-professional interests include travel with his wife and favorite companion Alamelu. Together they have traveled to many parts of the world. Vairavan loves music, literature, nature, walks, movies, company of friends and family, and great food. His love for good food was instilled by Alamelu, a culinary expert, instructor and a cookbook author. He has recently developed an interest in trying recipes from Alamelu’s cookbook (Healthy South Indian Cooking, Hipocrene Press, NY), and enjoys preparing delectable foods from that book.
(See www.curryonwheels.com for details.)
Vairavan’s interest in literature can be traced to his high school and undergraduate days when he enjoyed English classic works such as novels by Dickens, and Hindi literature. Although his native language is Tamil, Vairavan was inspired to study Hindi by his private tutor Gangadharan. .While pursuing his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering in India, he simultaneously studied Hindi and obtained several certificates in Hindi literature from the Hindi Prachar Sabha, Madras.
One of Vairavan’s favorite avocations is reading books, mostly biographies and historic non-fiction. He has been particularly interested in the biographies of scientists and political leaders from the 17th through the early 20th centuries (See a partial list of his favorite biographies)