Not many computer scientists worked as a high school columnist for a newspaper, but School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) Ph.D. student James Fox is a researcher with curiosities across the board. 

Now, his interests have expanded beyond traditional text, but he is still looking for succinct connections as his research dives into parallel computing, graph analytics, and machine learning. Fox even won a IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing GraphChallenge award for his work in graph analytics, Fast and Adaptive List Intersections on the GPU, in 2018.

[Related News: School of CSE Speeds up Graph Applications and Presents GraphChallenge Winning Paper at HPEC 2018]

Research Focus Areas: High Performance Computing, Graph Analytics, Deep Learning

Hometown: Bloomington, Indiana

Undergraduate Degree: Computer Science, U.C. Berkeley

Current Georgia Tech Degree Program: Computational Science and Engineering, Ph.D.

Tell us about your research: 

My research interests largely intersect with graph analytics and parallel computing. More recently, I’ve been working on graph representation learning, for use in predictive tasks. Some of my past work include designing and implementing high performance graph algorithms for graphic processing units (GPUs) and shared memory systems. 

Where is one of your favorite places to hang out in or near Atlanta? 

Perk’s Coffee in Marietta is one of my favorite cafes for studying. The only bad part is that it closes at 5 pm.

If you could create something, what would it be? 

Maybe it’s been done before, but I think it would be cool if someone created a platform for crowdsourcing low-key group activities with a map view. People make event pages and groups all the time for pick-up sports and other activities, but it’s hard to search through, and not centralized in any way. If someone has some activities that they’re interested in, it should be easier to get basic real-time information about what’s going on around them.

What are some of your hobbies? 

Ultimate frisbee, running, and hiking to name a few.

What is a favorite memory from your years at Georgia Tech?

Attending Supercomputing 2016 during my first year of my Ph.D. was really memorable. It was my first time getting to know and hanging out with a lot of the CSE students outside of school, and it was really fun!

What is your favorite movie?

My favorite movies series is The Lord of the Rings trilogy.