Auroop R. Ganguly

About

Auroop R. Ganguly is a hydrologist and a civil engineer, and currently a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at Northeastern University (NU) in Boston, MA, USA, where he is the Director of the Sustainability and Data Sciences Laboratory (SDS Lab). He is also Professor by courtesy of multiple NU departments and colleges, specifically, Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Marine and Environmental Sciences, Political Science, and Public Policy and Urban Affairs, as well as a Visiting International Professor of Computer Science and Environmental Science at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur. He is a member of the United Nations Environmental Program review panel and the lead author of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) section of the upcoming Sustained National Climate Assessment of the United States. He is the Chief Specialty Editor for water and built environment of the upcoming Frontiers in Water journal and serves on the editorial board of the journal PLOS ONE and Scientific Reports published by Nature, as well as the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering. He has previously served as an Associate Editor of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) journal Water Resources Research, and on the AI committee of the American Meteorological Union (AMS), besides having served as a co-chair of the Societal Dimensions Working Group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Ganguly has published in top interdisciplinary journals such as Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and Nature Climate Change, among others, and in highly regarded disciplinary journals in areas such as hydrometeorology and hydroclimate, climate and weather extremes, resilience of lifeline infrastructures, data mining and machine learning, as well as nonlinear physics. He has published a textbook on Critical Infrastructures Resilience by Taylor and Francis and other edited books on Knowledge Discovery from Sensor Data by CRC Press and LNCS. His research has been published in top computer, data science and AI venues, such as highly selective peer reviewed conferences including SIAM Data Mining (SDM) and ACM Knowledge Discovery and Data mining (KDD), where he has won multiple best paper awards. Ganguly’s research has been cited in United Nations and US assessment reports, highlighted in commentaries in scientific venues such as Nature, PNAS, NASA Tech Briefs, R&D Magazine, US Department of Energy (DOE), and National Science Foundation (NSF) news, while he and his work have been quoted by the news media in the US and across the globe. His former doctoral students and postgraduates are or have been in leadership positions in the private industry (e.g., in risk and hazards modeling, and machine learning), received prestigious international fellowships, employed as scientists in the US National Laboratory system and in government agencies such as NASA, and in faculty positions at US and international universities. Ganguly is the co-founder and chief scientific adviser at the NSF-funded startup risQ, where his former PhD student is the CEO and co-founder. In addition to teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in climate, water, applied data science, and critical infrastructures, Ganguly has been leading a study abroad undergraduate program on climate change science, engineering and policy across different regions of the world. He has 20+ years of professional experience spanning academia, private industry including startups, and government research laboratory, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oracle Corporation, and a best-of-breed company acquired by Oracle, besides joint, adjunct or visiting faculty positions at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the University of South Florida, and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. His experience in the private sector has included time series software development and analytics for the demand-driven supply chains, while his research at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory has touched upon climate extremes and homeland security, as well as computational and data sciences. He has brought in about $20M of research funding in his career from sources such NSF, NASA, US DOE, US Department of Defense (DOD) and other sources and won multiple mentorship and outstanding faculty or faculty fellow awards. Ganguly has a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Civil and Environmental Engineering, an MS in Civil Engineering from the University of Toledo, Ohio, and a B. Tech. (Hons.) from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur in Civil Engineering.

Selected Publications

(Current/former students, postdocs, mentees, visiting profs.: Underlined)

Books: Texts or Monographs

• A.R. Ganguly, U. Bhatia, and S.E. Flynn. Critical Infrastructures Resilience, Routledge (Taylor & Francis), 152 pages, 2018.
• A.R. Ganguly, J. Gama, O.A. Omitaomu, M. Gaber, and R.R. Vatsavai (Editors). Knowledge Discovery from Sensor Data, CRC Press (Taylor & Francis), 215 pages, 2008.

Peer-Reviewed Conferences 

(Highly Selective: < ~10% acceptance rate)

• T.J. Vandal, E. Kodra, S. Ganguly, A. Michaelis, R. Nemani, A.R. Ganguly. “DeepSD: Generating High Resolution Climate Change Projections through Single Image Super-Resolution”, KDD 2017, ACM SIGKDD Knowledge Discovery and Data mining, 2017, (Published in KDD 2017 Proceedings), Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, 2017. (Runner-Up Best Paper Award) Highlight: “The case for technology investments in the environment”, Nature, 552, 325-328, 2017.
• S. Chatterjee, K. Steinhaeuser, A. Banerjee, S. Chatterjee, and A.R. Ganguly. “Sparse Group Lasso: Consistency and Climate Applications”, SDM 2012, SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (Published in SDS 2012 Proceedings), Anaheim, CA, April 26-28, 2012. (Best Student Paper Award)

Peer-Reviewed Journals 

• K. Clark, U. Bhatia, E. Kodra, and A.R. Ganguly. “Resilience of the US national airspace system airport network”, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, accepted and in print.
• D. Kumar, and A.R. Ganguly. “Intercomparison of model response and internal variability across climate model ensembles”, Climate Dynamics, published online (DOI: 10.1007/s00382-017-3914-4), 2017.
• P. Ganguli, D. Kumar, and A.R. Ganguly. “US power production at risk from water stress in a changing climate”, Scientific Reports, 7, 11983, Nature Publishing Group, 2017.
• P. Ganguli, A.R. Ganguly. “Space-time trends in US meteorological droughts”, Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies, 8: 235-259, 2016.
• D. Wang, T.C. Gouhier, B.A. Menge, A.R. Ganguly. “Intensification and spatial homogenization of coastal upwelling under climate change”, Nature, 518, 390-394, 2015. (Cited in US NCA4 Vol. 1)
• U. Bhatia, D. Kumar, E. Kodra, and A.R. Ganguly. “Network Science Based Quantification of Resilience Demonstrated on the Indian Railways Network”, PLoS ONE, 10(11): e0141890, 2015.
• A.R. Ganguly, D. Kumar, P. Ganguli, G. Short, G. and J. Klausner. “Climate Adaptation Informatics: Water Stress on Power Production”, Computing in Science & Engineering, IEEE & AIP, 17(6), 53-60, 2015.
• D. Das, A.R. Ganguly, and Z. Obradovic. “A Bayesian sparse generalized linear model with an application to multiscale covariate discovery for observed rainfall extremes over the United States”, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 53(12): 6689-6702, 2015.
• E. Kodra, A.R. Ganguly. “Asymmetry of projected increases in extreme temperature distributions”, Scientific Reports, 4, 5884, Nature Publishing Group, 2014.
• D. Kumar, E. Kodra, and A.R. Ganguly. “Regional and seasonal intercomparison of CMIP3 and CMIP5 climate model ensembles for temperature and precipitation”, Climate Dynamics, 43 (9), 2491-2518, 2014. (Cited in US NCA4 Vol. 1)
• S. Liess, A. Kumar, P.K. Snyder, J. Kawale, K. Steinhaeuser,  F.H.M. Semazzi, A.R. Ganguly, N.F. Samatova, and V. Kumar. “Different modes of variability over the Tasman Sea: implications for regional climate”, Journal of Climate, 27(22): 8466-8486, 2014. Highlight: “How machine learning could help to improve climate forecasts”, Nature, 548, 379-380, 2017.
• A.R. Ganguly, E.A. Kodra, A. Agrawal, A. Banerjee, S. Boriah, Sn. Chatterjee, So. Chatterjee, A. Choudhary, D. Das, J. Faghmous, P. Ganguli, S. Ghosh, K. Hayhoe, C. Hays, W. Hendrix, Q. Fu, J. Kawale, D. Kumar, V. Kumar, W. Liao, S. Liess, R. Mawalagedara, V. Mithal, R. Oglesby, K. Salvi, P. K. Snyder, K. Steinhaeuser, D. Wang, and D. Wuebbles. “Toward enhanced understanding and projections of climate extremes using physics-guided data mining techniques”, Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics, 21, 777-795, 2014.
• D. Das, J. Dy, J. Ross, Z. Obradovic, and A.R. Ganguly. “Non-parametric Bayesian mixture of sparse regressions with application towards feature selection for statistical downscaling”, Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics, (Special Issue on Physics-driven Data Mining in Climate Change and Weather Extremes by Auroop Ganguly, Vimal Mishra, Daiwei Wang, William Hsieh, Forrest Hoffman, Vipin Kumar, and Juergen Kurths [Editors]), 21(1): 1145-1157, 2014.
• S. Ghosh, D. Das, S.-C. Kao, A.R. Ganguly. “Lack of uniform trends but increasing spatial variability in observed Indian rainfall extremes”, Nature Climate Change, 2, 2, 86-91, 2012.
• E. Kodra, K.S. Steinhaeuser, and A.R. Ganguly. “Persisting cold spells in the 21st-century warming environment,” Geophysical Research Letters, 38, L08705, 2011, 5 pp. Highlight: “Climate change: Cold spells in a warm world”, Nature, 472, 139, 2011. (Cited in IPCC AR5)
• S.-C. Kao, and A.R. Ganguly. “Intensity, duration, and frequency of precipitation extremes under 21st-century warming scenarios”, Journal of Geophysical Research, 116, D16, 119, 2156-2202, 2011. (Cited in IPCC AR5)
• K. Steinhaeuser, N.V. Chawla, A.R. Ganguly. “Complex networks as a unified framework for descriptive analysis and predictive modeling in climate science”, Statistical Analysis & Data Mining, American Statistical Association, 4(5), 497-511, 2011.
• A.R. Ganguly, K. Steinhaeuser, D.J. Erickson III, M. Branstetter, E.S. Parish, N. Singh, J.B. Drake, L. Buja. “Higher trends but larger uncertainty and geographic variability in 21st century temperature and heat waves”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 37, 15555-15559, 2009.
• O.A. Omitaomu, A.R. Ganguly, B. Patton, and V.A. Protopopescu. “Anomaly detection in radiation sensor data with application to transportation security”, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 10(2): 324-334, 2009.
• S. Khan, S. Bandyopadhyay, A.R. Ganguly, S. Saigal, D.J. Erickson III, V. Protopopescu, G. Ostrouchov. “Relative performance of mutual information estimation methods for quantifying the dependence among short and noisy data”, Physical Review E, 76, 2, 026209, 2007.

Spotlight Story

Mar 22, 2021

Onto NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

“Interdisciplinarity.” That’s what drew PhD candidate Venkata Shashank Konduri to Northeastern. Konduri is pursuing a PhD in Interdisciplinary Engineering, meaning he is taking coursework from different disciplines and performing valuable research on complicated, multi-subject problems. “During the course of my PhD, I took classes from various departments like civil engineering, marine science, policy, and electrical […]

In the Media

Nov 25, 2020

Northeastern University: A Valuable Partner for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

CEE Professor Auroop Ganguly was recently appointed as Chief Scientist of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)’s Advanced Computing, Mathematics, and Data Division, Physical and Computational Sciences Directorate. The new partnership between Northeastern University and PNNL focuses on urban resilience and security.

Faculty

Aug 10, 2020

Cloud Physics Conundrum: Finetuning Climate Models Using Machine Learning

CEE PhD student Nishant Yadav won the Best Student Paper Award by the AI Foundation For Good’s Fragile Earth Workshop for his paper “Machine Learning for Robust Identification of Complex Nonlinear Dynamical Systems: Applications to Earth Systems Modeling.”

Faculty

Jul 21, 2020

The 2020 Virtual Dialogue of Civilizations Program on Climate Change Science and Policy

While CEE Professor Auroop Ganguly was unable to travel with his Dialogue of Civilizations students to Tanzania, he was able to provide a unique and interdisciplinary experience for his students, one quite unlike a typical virtual course.

Faculty

Jun 01, 2020

Practical Tools to Recover from Network Disruption

CEE Professor Auroop Ganguly was awarded a patent for creating a “System for networking and analyzing geospatial data, human infrastructure, and natural elements.”

Faculty

May 28, 2020

Ganguly to Lead $3M SERDP Grant for Networked Infrastructures under Compound Extremes

CEE Professor Auroop Ganguly is the lead PI on a $3M grant for “NICE: Networked Infrastructures under Compound Extremes” from the DoD’s Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP).

Students

Mar 09, 2020

Shashank Konduri wins 1st Place Poster Presentation at American Meteorological Society’s 100th Annual Meeting

Interdisciplinary PhD student Shashank Konduri received the 1st Place Poster Presentation Award for his poster on “In-season crop mapping for the continental United States” at the American Meteorological Society’s 100th Annual Meeting.

In the Media

Jan 21, 2020

India’s Sanitation Measures may be Showing Initial Results

CEE Professor Auroop Ganguly was quoted in Nature India’s article “India’s sanitation measures may be showing initial results.”

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