John Owens
Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of California, Davis

office: Kemper Engineering Building (Engineering II) Room 3175 (map)
postal: Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616-5294
office phone: 530-754-4289     fax: 530-752-8428
email: web: http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/~jowens/

 picture of John Owens

Welcome to the homepage of Professor John Owens of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Davis.

Affiliations

Research

I am interested in broad topics in the field of computer systems, in particular those that use innovative hardware and software working together to solve challenging engineering problems. I am particularly interested in parallel computing, both hardware and software, and my most significant work is leading research projects in graphics hardware/GPGPU/GPU computing.

If you are interested in applying to Davis and doing research with our group, and are thinking about contacting me, please read this first.

My publication list is available online. I've assembled some Advice to Graduate Students and Researchers and a list of Common Errors In Technical Writing (many of which are LaTeX specific).

Teaching

In 2008–9, I taught EEC 180A, Digital Systems and EEC 277, Graphics Architecture in the winter, and EEC 171, Parallel Architecture in the spring. This winter I am teaching EEC 277, Graphics Architecture again and will also teach EEC 171, Parallel Architecture in the spring. My 2009 EEC 277 course is now on iTunes U (slides). More information on my courses can be found on my teaching page.

Service

I am general chair for the High Performance Graphics conference in 2011, after serving as program chair in 2009 and papers chair (2008) and publicity chair (2005–2007) for its predecessor, Graphics Hardware. I also recently served on the i3D 2009, Supercomputing 2009, and Eurographics 2009 (“Computational Graphics”) program committees, and I co-chaired the 2006 Workshop on On- and Off-Chip Interconnection Networks for Multicore Systems.

Funding

We are grateful to our funding agencies for making our research possible. Thanks to the SciDAC Institute for Ultrascale Visualization, the Department of Energy's Early Career Principal Investigator Award, the National Science Foundation, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the HP Labs Innovation Research Program, and UC MICRO for their support, and thanks also to our industrial supporters: NVIDIA, BMW, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Rambus, ChevronTexaco, and Lockheed-Martin.

Contacting Me

The best way to contact me is almost certainly through email. My travel calendar and weekly schedule may be of use in reaching me in person.

Biography

I am currently an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Davis. I began my appointment at Davis in January 2003 and was promoted to associate professor on 1 July 2008. Woo hoo!

I earned my Ph.D. in November 2002 in the Computer Systems Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University. At Stanford I was a member of the Concurrent VLSI Architecture Group and the Computer Graphics Laboratory. I was an architect of the Imagine Stream Processor, working closely with the Imagine team and my advisor, Bill Dally. My dissertation research explored polygon rendering on stream architectures such as Imagine. My CV (with publication list) can be found here (pdf).

I earned my B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley in 1995. Go Bears!

Due to a recent paper with Michael Mitzenmacher, my Erdős number is now 3 (Erdős to Joel Spencer to Michael Mitzenmacher to me). I am now actively figuring out how to get an Erdős-Bacon number; anyone who can get me in a movie with Kevin Bacon can join me as an author on the paper of your choice*.

My links page contains pointers to a few of my favorite things, including The Game. And if there's too much seriousness above, try another version.

*: To promotion and tenure committees: Not a serious offer†.

†: To Hollywood producers: Yes it is.

Last updated .