Dr. K. Palaniappan is currently Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He received his PhD from the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (ECE Dept) in 1991. He worked at NASA Goddard for six years where he helped establish the Visualization and Analysis Laboratory in the Lab for Atmospheres that has produced a number of spectacular Digital Earth visualizations and holographic displays for the Smithsonian Museums. He developed the Interactive Image SpreadSheet the first tool capable of handling large multispectral remote sensing imagery, and also developed the first massively parallel semi-fluid motion analysis algorithm using the 64,000 processor Maspar supercomputer for tracking hurricane cloud winds and for numerical weather prediction. He helped develop the HDF EOS format in meteorological applications for archival of terabyte data streams from remote sensing satellites.
At the University of Missouri-Columbia he co-founded the $1.7 million Multimedia Communications and Visualization Laboratory funded by grants from NASA, NSF, Raytheon and SGI which includes a distributed cluster computing environment consisting of multiprocessor SGI and PC workstations (Origin, Octane2, Octane, O2, Dell), a terabyte Linux RAID5 storage system, and a Fakespace Immersive Workdesk VR display. He co-established the multi-college undergraduate GIS teaching lab and the high speed Internet2 research network using Gigabit Ethernet and ATM technologies. He has over seventy publications in the areas of scientific visualization, virtual reality, computational remote sensing, bioimaging, parallel computing, and data mining. His awards include the NASA Public Service Medal for pioneering contributions to scientific visualization, and the University of Missouri William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence (the highest teaching award given by the University of Missouri).