Krithivasan Ramamritham

In the area of hard real-time systems, Krithivasan Ramamritham's interests are in the architectural and operating system support for hard real-time systems, scheduling mechanisms for multitasking environments under dynamic conditions, and the composable design of adaptable software systems that integrate hard real-time with fault-tolerance, including issues relating to the design-time and run-time assurance of their correctness, timeliness, predictability, and reliability properties. In the database area, Ramamritham is interested in supporting novel, advanced applications that expand the limits of traditional databases, especially transaction systems. Here, Ramamritham's work aims to enhance the performance and functionality of applications (such as workflows and information retrieval) that require or can benefit from transactional support, by exploiting semantic information about the objects, operations, transaction model, and the application. In the area of real-time databases, Ramamritham's work  ocuses on integrating active, real-time, temporal, and multimedia databases for time-constrained applications. Priority assignment and real-time transaction scheduling in active real-time databases, real-time logging and recovery, temporal consistency and scheduling in temporal databases, and multimedia databases are some of the current topics under investigation.

Ramamritham joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts in 1980 and is an adjunct professor. He is currently at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay as the Vijay and Sita Vashee Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. His areas of interest include database systems, real-time systems, and Internet computing. He was a Science and Engineering Research Council (U.K.) visiting fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K., and has held visiting positions at the Technical University of Vienna, Austria, and at the Indian Institutes of Technology.

Ramamritham served as program chair for the Real-Time Systems Symposium in 1994 and as general chair in 1995. Also, he was a vice chair for the Conference on Data Engineering in 1995 and has served on numerous program committees of conferences and workshops devoted to databases as well as real-time systems. He is an editor of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, the Real-Time Systems Journal, the International Journal of Applied Software Technology, and the Distributed Systems Engineering Journal. He has coauthored two IEEE tutorial texts on real-time systems, a text on advances in database transaction processing, and a forthcoming text on scheduling in real-time systems. Ramamritham is a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM and a senior member of the IEEE.